The Exhibitionist Issue 4

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4 4NO. 4 / JOURNAL ON EXHIBITION MAKING / JUNE 2011

THE

EXHIBITIONIST

LA CRITIQUE



NO. 4 JUNE 2011

CONTENTS

Reflection Jens Hoffmann and Tara McDowell 2

Response I: The Artist and the CuratorDorothea von Hantelmann The Curatorial Paradigm 6

Dieter Roelstraete We, the Subjects of Art 13Massimiliano Gioni The Limits of Interpretation 17

Response II: Toward a History of Exhibitions

Julian Myers On the Value of a History of Exhibitions 24

Teresa Gleadowe Inhabiting Exhibition History 29

Christian Rattemeyer What History of Exhibitions? 35

Response III: Curatorial Education Johanna Burton On Knot Curating 42

Andrew Renton Forms of Practice:

Curating in the Academy 55

Kate Fowle An Education 61

Response IV: The ParacuratorialVanessa Joan Müller Relays 66

Lívia Páldi Notes on the Paracuratorial 71

Emily Pethick The Dog that Barked at the Elephant

in the Room 77

La Critique

Miguel A. López Beyond Participation 84

Lawrence Rinder Curatorial Control 84

Tina Kukielski Prolonged Exposure 86

Mia Jankowicz Curator with a Capital C or

Dilettante with a Small d 87

Jarrett Gregory Bestial Acts 88

Rodrigo Moura Yellow Years 88

An Illustrated Bibliography of The Exhibitionist, Issues I–IV 43–50

The Exhibitionist

Cover of Cahiers du Cinéma 126

(December 1961)



2

REFLECTION

Jens Hoffmann and Tara McDowell

The Exhibitionist no. 1 was published in January 2010

as the rst issue of the rst-ever journal devoted to

contemporary curatorial practice and exhibition

making.1 Our aim was to create a specialized publica-tion for a professional eld that has grown vastly over

the past two decades and was in need of a recurring,

critical platform to discuss its ways and means. Over

the past 18 months we have published four issues

containing kinds of writing that, for the most part,

did not exist before. With this fourth issue we would

like to take the opportunity to look back at some of

the discussions that have arisen and respond to some

of the reactions that the journal has provoked.

The Exhibitionist does not aim to supplant artis-

tic practice with curatorial practice, nor is it meant

to consolidate the power of the curator. This is not

an either/or proposition. Close readings of exhibi-

tions by those who make exhibitions only makes us

more accountable for the work we show and our

motivations for showing it. Our proposal also does

not represent any consensus of curating. The widely

divergent voices within these pages make clear how

we conceive of curating: as a discourse with many

viewpoints, styles, and commitments. While we do

claim a particular editorial position, we are not aim-

ing to establish a single school of exhibition making.

Rather, we want to participate in and foster the di - versication of exhibition models. There are writers

in this issue who explicitly disagree with the journal’s

editorial opinion, and who come to conclusions at

variance with one another. Looking back over the

past issues, the range of writing styles, arguments,

and chosen subjects is striking, especially consider-

ing the journal’s strict editorial structure. We have

purposefully resisted a homogenous, or hegemonic,

approach to curating.

This may seem at odds with the journal’s

professed belief in exhibition making as a form of

authorship—the editorial claim that has, under-

standably, generated the most debate and disagree-ment. But the emphasis is mistakenly on a seemingly

anachronistic appropriation of authorship, and elides

what for us is the central point: that exhibition mak -

ing is a kind of making.

This issue of The Exhibitionist diverges a bit from

previous issues. Gone is the distinctive, bright yellow

cover (an appropriation of, and homage to, Cahiers

du cinéma ). On the cover, rather than a single image

(those in past issues were selected for the especially

emphatic ways they staged various positions of look -

ing and being looked at) appears a phrase deployed

with tongue just slightly in cheek: “La Critique.” This

and every subsequent fourth issue of The Exhibitionist

offers a forum for response and critique.

In the critique section, we welcome critical

commentary about the journal itself: both its edito-

rial commitments and the specic content of earlier

articles. We envision this section as permitting the

brief, but passionately argued, response that is the

“letter to the editor”—a response that segues what

was once a closed, nal statement into an open

dialogue. The opinions offered by Jarrett Gregory,

Mia Jankowicz, Tina Kukielski, Miguel A. López,Rodrigo Moura, and Lawrence Rinder do not co-

alesce into a neat mapping of key themes of the jour-

nal, nor any illusory status quo of curating. Rather,

they are idiosyncratic and deeply personal.

A topic that has been discussed at length, in

both the pages of this journal and the larger art

world, is the relationship between the artist and the

curator. Some may feel that this issue has been dis-

cussed to exhaustion, but we have noticed a strong



3

desire on the part of many curators to look into it

anew and push the conversation further. In these

pages, Massimiliano Gioni, Dieter Roelstraete, and

Dorothea von Hantelmann offer points of view that

recognize the complexity of this relationship and its

historical development. Von Hantelmann notes that

the increased signicance of curating in the past few

decades directly correlates with the new cultural and

social value placed on acts of selection: “Only with

an understanding of this new culture of choosing, I

argue, can we recognize the embeddedness of cura-

torial practice in the present socioeconomic order of

Western societies.” For Gioni, the role of the curator

is more akin to that of the interpreter. He cautions

against a tide of resistance to interpreting artworks in

ways other than the artist intended. “There is quite

a bit of room inside an artwork, a vast space that ac-

commodates multiple and varied readings,” he writes.

Roelstraete prefers to frame the debate not aroundgood artists or good curators, but on “whether this is

a good work of art or that a good exhibition.”

The second topic discussed here is the neces-

sary and relevant subject of the history of exhibi-

tions. Teresa Gleadowe, Julian Myers, and Christian

Rattemeyer demonstrate that despite the spate of

recent and forthcoming texts on the subject, this is

a nascent history, still very much in formation with

much interesting work to be done. Gleadowe calls

for an exhibition history that we actively inhabit and

interrogate through the lens of our own commit-

ments and methodologies, as a preventative measure

against the “false familiarity” of a “sterile canon of

‘landmark’ exhibitions.” Rattemeyer argues that, in

fact, precisely what this emergent discourse needs is

a canon of exhibitions comprised of in-depth case

studies as well as a “terminology and methodology

of scholarly description.”

Myers for his part warns us that “a phobia

of artworks seems to be the cost of a fetishization of

exhibitions” and stresses the need for a history of

exhibitions to turn to artworks—not perfunctorily

but with deep, sustained attention. Certainly thispoint is well taken, but it also makes the task at hand

somewhat Herculean. In addition to attending to the

organization, installation, and reception of the ex-

hibition, the historical specicity of the moment in

which it appeared, its relevance for contemporary

practice, and its material relations with market and

site, there are, of course (and most importantly) the

works that are in it. Moreover, close examination of

an exhibition necessarily reveals in all its squirminess

what a history of art and artists would—and does—

leave out: the forgotten artists, the failed artworks,

the minor or transitional efforts. Writing or teaching

a history of exhibitions, then, can quickly become

not just Herculean, but unruly, as the photographic

and historical record demands writing back in the

gures so often left out.Curatorial education, our third topic, has been

the subject of much discussion lately, and rightly so

given that we are dealing with a new academic disci-

pline that is most likely here to stay. Johanna Burton,

recently appointed director of the graduate program

at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies,

names the elephant in the room: “the possibility

that considerations of curating . . . are in the process

of becoming fully loosened from considerations of

art in any previously coherent or stable sense.” For

Burton, however, though it may be fashionable for

students to eschew art and its institutions in favor oftheory engaged with culture, or image circulation

more broadly, we would do well not to abandon art’s

institutions so quickly.

Andrew Renton, director of curating at Gold-

smiths College for the past eight years, arrives at a

somewhat similar conclusion. In recent years, he

says, something was lost in the curator’s dogged pur-

suit of independence from collections and museums.

“If today’s generation of curators inherits a legacy

of dematerialized, process- and discourse-driven cu-

rating,” he writes, “the physical absence that is pro-

duced in the wake of such strategies becomes a site

of mourning and loss. Something was left behind.”

And nally Kate Fowle, who cofounded and led the

graduate program in curatorial practice at Califor-

nia College of the Arts from 2002–8, asks us to push

beyond stale debates about whether or not such pro-

grams should exist. In dialogue with Maria Lind’s

polemical assessment of such programs in the third

issue of The Exhibitionist, Fowle reframes the debate

to consider “how to provide opportunities for growth

over, say, a 40-year career” rather than via a two-year

graduate program. As with exhibition histories, there is little con-

sensus about how curatorial education should be po-

sitioned in relation to art history. Is it a subeld of art

history, or distinct from it? How far into the reaches

of the academy should it wander? How much should

it replicate art history’s structures and narratives? It

is worth noting that such uncertainty about the ways,

means, and boundaries of a discipline is part of what

keeps it vital. Art history, to this end, would do well to



4

The Exhibitionist

consider how these unwieldy upstarts might produc-

tively trouble its own procedures.

Here is another question we have asked our-

selves: How much can “the curatorial” annex

and still remain nimble without becoming mega-

lomaniacal—or, worse, a “half-abstracted meta-

discourse” (in the words of Julian Myers) without

a subject? This last question is in response to cu-

rating’s growing popularity and prestige (while, for

example, as others have noted here and elsewhere,

the importance of the art critic has declined), and

the tendency for an ascendant body to almost

magnetically attract and annex whatever lies near-

by. We are calling this phenomenon “the para-

curatorial.” This practice denes curating not as

bound to exhibition making, but rather as encom-

passing, and making primary, a range of activities

that have traditionally been parenthetical or supple-

mentary to the exhibition proper. We especially likeLívia Páldi’s concise, yet performatively accumu-

lative, denition put forth in her essay here: “The

term, which encompasses lectures, interviews, edu-

cational events, residencies, publications, screenings,

readings, and performances, implies an intertwining

net of activities as well as diverse modes of operation

and conversation based on more occasional, tempo-

rary alliances of artists, curators, and the public.”

Páldi notes that the paracuratorial is linked to, and

takes advantage of, temporary and mobile models

of coming-together that are themselves the result of

emphasis placed on the distribution of knowledge

rather than its production. And yet, “in an age that is

literally drowning in events,” the paracuratorial runs

the risk of simply adding to that problem.

Vanessa Joan Müller limns the historical trajec-

tory of the paracuratorial and nds its roots in the

New Institutionalism that emerged in the 1990s,

and also in the institutional critique of the preced-

ing decades. She asks that we retain the exhibition as

our central form and collaborate with other arenas,

rather than appropriate their activities into our own

(art institutions’) theater of operations as a kind ofsecond-wave institutional critique. “We ought not

to forget,” she writes, “that other places exist where

much of what we increasingly nd ourselves do-

ing is also done—places like universities, repertory

cinemas, community centers, and so on, and which

merely await our willingness to cooperate.” For

Emily Pethick, it is precisely the boundaries and

“unnecessary dualism” posited by the term “para-

curatorial” that require rethinking. The moment a

project runs up against boundaries or obstacles may

bring about its most productive turn.

We wonder, as all editors and writers do, who

our readers are, and where their commitments lie.

Even though this is a highly specialized publica-

tion directed at a sliver of an already-circumscribed

art world, it seems that, paradoxically, discussionsaround curating are becoming more and more splin-

tered and isolated. This atomization, we feel, results

from the total success of the contemporary and the

demands of that model that our energies be directed

at parsing certain curatorial trends: social practice,

the educational turn, New Institutionalism, and so

on. We do not claim to be immune to such tempta -

tions, but we do feel, and wish to stress, that the often

isolated and unconnected discussions around curat-

ing are in fact parts of a larger evaluation, of clear

relevance to all, concerned with reformulating the

relationships among art, critical thinking, the public,cultural institutions, and the politics inherent to all

of these.

Notes

1. With the recent launch of the Journal of Curatorial Studies, The

Exhibitionist is no longer alone in this pursuit. Other periodicals on

the subject of curating are apparently in the making.



5

The Exhibitionist

RESPONSE I

THE ARTIST

AND

THE CURATOR

Dorothea von Hantelmann

Dieter Roelstraete

Massimiliano Gioni



6

The Exhibitionist

In 1972, on the occasion of his participation in Harald Szeemann’s

Documenta 5 , the artist Daniel Buren wrote a much-quoted statement for the

exhibition catalogue in which he claimed that “More and more, the subject

of an exhibition tends not to be the display of art works, but the exhibition

of the exhibition as a work of art.”1 Buren was reacting against what he saw

as a tendency among curators to overemphasize the curatorial concept and

assume an authorial role in the presentation of artworks—a tendency argu-

ably spearheaded by Szeemann himself—warning that the logical conclusion

of this would eventually be the reversal of the relationship between the art-

work and the exhibition, as the latter would have to be acknowledged as the

actual work.2

In some respects Buren was right. With his innovative exhibition con-

cepts, Szeemann transformed the idea of curating from a rather scholarlypractice, aimed at the “objective” presentation of art historical knowledge,

into a creative and individually authored activity, and in doing so shifted the

idea of the curator from a conservator of art to a metteur-en-scène of exhibi-

tions. Szeemann was not the rst to break with the tradition in this manner,

but he did so in a particularly deliberate way. “I am simply no longer willing,”

he said, “to merely ll up an available space, but tend more and more to

projecting my own ideas into it.”3 Stepping out of his previous anonymity, he

claimed an authorial role in his own right.

This not only marked the birth of the independent curator, who, no lon-

ger backed by an institution, institutionalizes his or her own style of making

exhibitions. It also transformed the character of the exhibition. What used to

be a rather scholarly medium for encountering artworks now became a me-

dium that included elements of personal expression in which the vision of an

individual—the curator—manifested itself.4 Consequently, the presentation

of the individual work gave way to a no longer conventionalized, but rather

increasingly individualized, curatorial narrative. Similar to the evolution of

the artist, who since antiquity and far into the 18th century was a craftsper-

son, then slowly evolved into a creative genius, the curator—equally driven

THE CUR ATORIAL PARADIGM


1. Daniel Buren, “Ausstellung

einer Ausstellung” (1972), in

Daniel Buren, Achtung! Texte

1967–1991 (Dresden and Basel:

Verlag der Kunst, 1995): 181.

2. Consequently, Buren proposed

a work that places the focus on

precisely this situation. Instead

of simply adding another piece

to the exhibition, he chose an

already curated room with

paintings by artists such as

Jasper Johns, Robert Ryman, and

Brice Marden and covered the

walls beneath the paintings with

striped wallpaper. Exhibition

of an Exhibition was a work that

dissolved the hierarchy between

the artwork and its environmental

support, thereby producing a cer-tain bafflement in the viewer as to

the actual location of the work of

art—the paintings, the wall, or the

entire situation—and also pointed

out the extent to which this “entire

situation” determines or co-

determines the experience and

the meaning of any artwork.

3. Harald Szeemann, Museum

der Obsessionen (Berlin: Merve,

1981): 119ff.

4. Interestingly, this develop-

ment took place parallel to the

emergence of director’s theater.

It should therefore be mentioned

that Szeemann also came from

theater before turning to art.

This aspect cannot be gone into

more deeply here, but it would

certainly be worth exploring.



7

Response I

by thrusts of increasing individualization taking place in society—ascended

from being a service provider to becoming a meaning producer, who “signs”

an exhibition with a personal style and vision and therefore makes it possible

to identify the exhibition as the work of a specic individual.5

Today curators enjoy an extraordinary presence and prominent position

in contemporary culture, while their practice, curating, is not only taught innumerous curatorial study programs but tends to be regarded as comparable

to art. “Is the Curator an Artist? Is the Contemporary Exhibition an Art-

work?” was the title of a recent symposium in Ljubljana, picking up Buren’s

statement from 1972 yet giving it a much more positive spin. 6 However, the

questions of how to explain these phenomena remain: What are the reasons

for this change in the status of curating from a secondary, administrative,

scholarly task to a creative, quasi-artistic practice? How could the curator

become such a prominent gure in contemporary culture? What do these

developments say about today’s culture and society?

Clearly, the ubiquitous presence of curators today has to do with the

explosive increase in the number of exhibitions in recent decades. Given the

sheer quantity of new museum buildings, exhibition spaces, and biennials,

the medium of the exhibition has evidently gained an enormous popular-

ity and signicance in contemporary culture. This signicance is not a new

phenomenon, but rather continues a success story that began about 200

years ago with the historical emergence of exhibitions and museums. In 1867

Edouard Manet said that exhibitions are a vital format for artists because they

generate not only income, but also encouragement and incitement to create

more new work.7

With the rise of exhibitions, the artist’s status changed alongwith that of the public, as the latter became a new addressee and power fac-

tor in the art world. But, even more, it was museums and exhibitions that

created the modern notion of “art”; in previous cultures of the court and ar-

istocracy, paintings and sculptures had existed as parts of princely collections

or were integrated into religious functional contexts. It was the fact of their

public presentation, their being exhibited in museums that were accessible to

a public, that set a development in motion that led to the modern concept of

autonomous art.

But the exhibition’s most important cultural accomplishment was the

constitution of a site in which basic categories of modern societies are en-

acted and exercised. Museums and exhibitions introduced a ritual that ful-

lls precise functions in modern Western societies: it addresses the individual

citizen (where theater, as an older cultural format, addressed a collective); it

places the individual in relation to a material object (in an increasingly in-

dustrialized society that derives its wealth and identity from a manufactured

object-world); and it immerses both the individual and the object into a nar-

ration of linear time, progress, and development.8 The format of the exhibi-

tion connects the individual to these pillars of modern Western society and

5. I’m not saying that all curators

have become “creative” exhibi-

tion makers today. My focus is on

the creatives, but of course the

traditional museum or collection

curator also continues to exist.

6. Held at the Igor Zabel

Association for Culture and

Theory, October 1–2, 2010.

7. Edouard Manet, “Catalogue

des Tableaux de M. Edouard

Manet exposés Avenue de l’Alma

en 1867, Paris 1867,” quoted from

Oskar Bätschmann, Ausstellung-

skünstler. Kult und Karriere im

modernen Kunstsystem (Cologne:

DuMont, 1997): 10.

8. See also Die Ausstellung: Politik

eines Rituals , eds. Dorothea von

Hantelmann and Carolin Meister

(Berlin, Zurich: Diaphanes, 2010).



8

The Exhibitionist

helps to consolidate them in individual and collective consciousness.

I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that it is not art but the exhibition

that is the denitive invention of modern times. The emergence of exhibition

paintings (meaning, paintings explicitly made to be shown in exhibitions) in

the 18th century, of exhibitions organized by artists in the 19th century (for

instance Gustave Courbet’s 1855 Pavillon du Réalisme ), and of exhibition art(art that can only be shown in exhibitions) in the 20th century validates this.

Yet, and this brings us back to our initial question about the changed status

of the curator: If the actual moment of the production of meaning lies in

the exhibition (and not, or at least not primarily, in the artwork), doesn’t this

imply that the actual producer of meaning is the curator?

If this is the case, one might object, then why is it only in the last few

decades that curatorial practice has come to be respected as a creative and

signicant activity? Firstly, because as long as curating was committed to an

art historical canon that was charged with a certain authority and objectivity,

the exhibition did not play itself into the foreground. As long as the exhibi-

tion was based on a conventionalized narration, it did not become present as

a medium in its own right. It needed a certain thrust of subjectivation of the

curator’s practice, and this thrust was induced by gures such as Szeemann in

the 1960s.

The second reason is that the specic techniques on which both the ex-

hibition and the curator’s practices are based have recently gained new sig -

nicance in contemporary Western societies. What is it that lies at the core of

the curator’s practice? It is the act of selection. Of course, curating implies a

broad range of activities and demands various skills. Curators produce, com-municate, and organize knowledge. But all this takes its starting point in deci-

sions for specic artistic practices or positions. The exhibition is a narrative

written by curatorial choices—choices that the visitor responds to in his or

her own selections of artworks to focus on and linger over. Exhibitions can be

seen as sites in which practices of comparing, distinguishing, and selecting are

trained, cultivated, and rened—practices that, as will be shown, have gained

an enormous importance in today’s consumer culture.9 Yet if, in today’s soci-

eties, the skill—or, if you will, the “art”—of choosing 10 has become a cultural

practice in its own right, the emergence of the contemporary independent

curator has brought about an actual profession with choosing as its center: the

selection of artistic works, and aesthetic and discursive positions, which the

curator places into new contexts of meaning. Only with an understanding of

this new culture of choosing, I argue, can we recognize the embeddedness of

curatorial practice in the present socioeconomic order of Western societies.

And only in recognizing this embeddedness can we understand the curator’s

relatively visible position in contemporary culture.

The new importance of selection is essentially connected to profound

9. Boris Groys refers to museums

as “preschools of consumption”

because they train people in

experiencing aesthetic differ-

ences; they refine their ability

to compare and to differentiate

between aestheticized objects.

See Boris Groys, Topologie der

Kunst (Munich, Vienna: Hanser

2003): 47ff.

10. Sheena Iyengar, The Art of

Choosing (New York: Twelve,

2010).



9

Response I

transformations of Western societies in the second half of the 20th century. I

am referring to the transition from societies of scarcity to those of afuence,

a process that became apparent in North America in the 1950s and in West-

ern Europe in the 1960s and that had already been predicted in the 1930s by

the economist John Maynard Keynes before it was rst discussed in depth by

John Kenneth Galbraith in his inuential book The Afuent Society, publishedin 1958. For the rst time in the history of Western civilizations, the aggregate

sum of production was greater than what the population could consume,

and societies predicated on scarcity became societies predicated on afuence.

The phenomenon of afuence signied a transition from supply-driven to

demand-driven markets and the shift from modern industrial to postindus-

trial consumer societies.

The ecological and economic consequences of this have now reached

general public consciousness. The cultural impact of this transition, however,

at least as an impact, seems much less present. According to the German soci-

ologist Gerhard Schulze and his seminal 1992 study Die Erlebnisgesellschaft (The

Experience Society), the transformation from a society of scarcity to one of

afuence has produced a change in the way individuals relate to themselves.11

With increased income and leisure time, more and more people can (and

need to) shape their lives according to their own needs and preferences. “Our

living situation continually forces us to make distinctions,” says Schulze.12 And

more than ever before, people perceive their existence as something that can

and must be created and shaped. In every aspect of how we plan and live our

lives we experience increased possibilities, of which the increase in consump-

tion is only one of many aspects. In the eld of consumption, however, this change is especially palpable.

Under conditions of scarcity, relating to things means adjusting to their char-

acteristics; you have to deal with what is there. A multitude of options changes

one’s relation to things. Now you have to select, which means adjusting the

criteria to suit oneself. People can and need to learn how to relate to their

living contexts in a mode of selection. The selector, as Schulze says, becomes

the paradigmatic personality type in the new consumer society, but one whose

selection criteria are no longer primarily purpose-oriented—that is, driven

by necessity—but instead increasingly driven by aesthetic preferences and

subjective taste. If I have to choose, I can do so according to necessity or ac-

cording to taste. I can, to use a banal example, decide on clothing that satis-

es practical requirements or looks good. And what we have experienced in

Western societies since the 1950s and 1960s is the fact that this area of the

not-necessary, of the aesthetic, has gained considerable importance.

The fact that people no longer primarily relate to their everyday lives in

a purpose-oriented mode, but aesthetically, and that they stylize their day-

to-day living in a wide range of forms and also recognize one another in

11. Gerhard Schulze, Die Erlebnis-

gesellschaft (Frankfurt and New

York: Campus, 1992).

12. Gerhard Schulze, “From Situa-

tions to Subjects: Moral Discourse

in Transition” in Constructing the

New Consumer Society (New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 1997): 42.



11

Response I

to form something coherent—to produce, as an exhibition, more than the

sum of its parts. This is the difference between choosing and curating, and

it points to a skill that is demanded from individuals in advanced consumer

societies: not only to be able to select, but also to know how to unite their acts

of selection in a way that produces meaning, be this a coherent lifestyle or a

coherent personality. There is a hierarchy between artist and curator—in which the artist

counts as the authentic producer but the curator as the intermediary, second-

ary agency—that has established itself as part of the bourgeois value system

in which, according to Enlightenment economics, the producing subject and

productive labor have considerably more status. But both gures are at base

constructed categories that have emerged along historical thrusts of subjec-

tivation. Just as in modern industrialized societies the visual artist, as a pro -

ducer of the most sophisticated material objects, impersonates the produc-

ing individual in a kind of “higher” modality, so does the curator embody a

particularly advanced version of the selecting individual in advanced con-

sumer societies. While the former, the artist/productive individual, generates

subjectivity through production, the latter, the curator/selecting individual,

generates subjectivity through consumption. If we understand the eld of art

in this sense as one in which basic characteristics of a socioeconomic order

are reected and manifested, the sharper focus on the curator that has been

noticeable for a while now doesn’t at all appear to be a coincidental phenom-

enon. Instead it mirrors fundamental transitions in the socioeconomic order

of contemporary Western societies, to which art has always been intrinsically

linked. A society in which the focus is shifting from production to consump-tion needs new actors and protagonists. In this context the curator emerges

as a gure who to a certain extent selects exemplarily, who is constituted in

choosing (particular works of art, discursive positions, aesthetic acts, et cet-

era), and above all in whom consumption is manifested not only as a receptive

capacity, but as a productive and generative force.

In the eld of art it was Marcel Duchamp who anticipated, paradigmati-

cally performed, and articulated this transition. For in this context the ready -

made occupies the position of a junction. On the one hand the exhibition of

the readymade object encapsulates the production paradigm of modernity,

and thus of the 19th century: In the presentation of the sheer thing it parades

the mode of industrial production. Particularly from today’s perspective the

readymades confront us as objects from another time, witnesses to an epoch,

icons of the modern paradigm of industrial production. Yet Duchamp also

shifted the focus from production to the act of selection, as he points out

in his famous description of the readymade: “Whether Mr. Mutt made the

fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He chose it.”15 In an

interview in 1961 he even declared the act of choosing to be the actual artistic

15. Marcel Duchamp, “The

Richard Mutt Case” in Art in

Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996):

248.



12

The Exhibitionist

16. Marcel Duchamp in a 1961

interview with Georges Charbon-

nier, quoted in Thierry de Duve,

Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge:

MIT Press, 1998): 162.

gesture. “Choice is the main thing,” he says, “even in a normal painting….

In order to choose, you can use tubes of paint, you can use brushes, but you

can also use a readymade thing, made either mechanically or by the hand

of another man, even, if you want, appropriate it, since it’s you who chose

it.”16 The readymade marks the transition of a production-oriented society

to a selection-oriented society, and thus anticipates a historical moment thatessentially characterized the 20th century: from a classical industrial model

to an advanced consumer society. Duchamp turned the act of choosing into

a new paradigm of creativity. Or, rather, he sharpened a practice that had al-

ways existed into something like a paradigm. He recognized and anticipated

the slightly shifting accentuation from the former to the latter, a shift that

would gain signicance in the decades to follow in culture and society, and,

consequently, as an artistic strategy.



13

Response I

“There is in any case no realm of study that is more social than that of art.”

—F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art

In 1950, the Viennese-born British art historian Ernst Gombrich published

his magnum opus The Story of Art , still one of the best-selling and most wide-

ly read art books of all time. It begins with the following oft-quoted words:

“There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.” This was the

early 1950s, of course, the years of Existentialism’s imperious ascendancy in

the philosophical arena, and Abstract Expressionism’s unchallenged assertion

of an arch-individualist ideology of genius in the eld of artistic production:

a time when artists, critics, philosophers, and writers—individuals—were

kings. (But not queens. Existentialism and Abstract Expressionism, the most

emblematic expressions of the egomania that engulfed the general culturallandscape in the immediate postwar era, were, unsurprisingly, decidedly ma-

cho affairs.) According to Gombrich there could not be such a thing as “Art—

there could only be individuals named ‘artists,’ whose works could perhaps be

viewed as constituting one source of this partly delusional thing called ‘Art.’”

For reasons that need not detain us here, this euphoric celebration of an

authoritative, insular subjectivity would prove to be rather short-lived, at least

in philosophical and critical discourse. First came the challenges of structur-

alism, followed by the deaths of both the author and the humanist subject as

such (proclaimed by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, respectively), then

the systems-and-structures-obsessed social art history that dominated a fair

chunk of the 1970s. This last was the academic equivalent of much work be-

ing done in the art of the time that likewise sought to dismantle or erase the

tangle of modernist myths that continued to surround avant-garde notions

of authorship and identity, agency and autonomy, genius and individuation.

Indeed, had Gombrich published The Story of Art in 1970, chances are that

the story would have begun with the following words instead: “There really is

no such thing as an artist. There is only Art.” Of course, in the 1970s “Art”

would probably have been read just as reductively as the system of art, or art

WE, THE SUBJECTS OF ART

Dieter Roelstraete



14

The Exhibitionist

world: the meshwork of power relationships called art, the wholly arbitrary

structure that produces art. Whereas the point of our hypothetical exercise—

dreaming of a book that could have begun by saying “There really is no such

thing as an artist. There is only Art”—is that this latter sentence really means

only this, or really should only be read as: “There is only the idea of art.”

What does it mean for a curator to dream of a book that declares thenonexistence of artists? Not much, because this particular curator would be

just as enthusiastic (even more so!) about a book that begins by saying, “There

really is no such thing as curating. There is only Art.” And/or, “There really

is no such thing as art criticism. There is only Art.” Et cetera, ad nauseam.

As long as we agree that there is only art, only the idea of art—the idea from

which the idea of the artist springs, along with the idea of the curator, the

idea of the critic, et cetera, ad nauseam, all of them ideas about which we can

agree or disagree.

Why on earth would anyone working in contemporary art want to re-

read the opening sentence of a book as outdated and irrelevant, it seems, as

Gombrich’s The Story of Art —so outdated and irrelevant that I don’t even have

a copy (never had one—but then again I’m not an art historian), and hardly

know anyone who does anymore? Because two or three events that took place

in quick succession in the fall of last year in my hometown of Berlin managed

to convince me that Gombrich’s epochal, provocative statement is perhaps

not as outdated as it may seem. These two or three events appeared to con -

rm that there really are only artists after all, and no art to speak of.

The rst was the appointment of the Polish artist Artur Zmijewski as

the next curator of the Berlin Biennale, followed by a hotly debated open callfor project submissions, which tempted me to briey consider the possibility

of submitting my own project-specic portfolio consisting of drawings, po-

ems, and documentary records of performances (an art exhibition exclusively

made up of the artful juvenilia of curators—now there’s an idea), but which

also led to a considerable measure of consternation among the curatoriat

that was difcult to dismiss—however tempting this option may have been—

as mere territorial anxiety.1 The second event was the opening, just a couple

of weeks later, of Willem de Rooij’s impressive Intolerance exhibition at one

of Berlin’s most prestigious art venues, the Neue Nationalgalerie—an instal-

lation made up of other artists’ works, primarily 17th-century Dutch bird

paintings by Melchior d’Hondecoeter and 18th- and 19th-century feathered

objects from Hawaii. It was easily (and this is not without signicance) one of

the best and most memorable shows of 2010.

In a published conversation I had the pleasure of undertaking with

de Rooij shortly after the show’s opening, we touched upon a prodigious

wealth of subjects, ranging from Dutch colonial history and the South Pacic

uncanny to the politics and rhetoric of display.2 But, rather curiously, one

thing that was never mentioned was the project’s relationship to curatorial

1. This is not as idiotic as i t may

seem. For many curators, the path

to exhibition making has involved

crossing the desolate, windswept

plains of art making. This is

certainly true of yours truly, who

at age 25 even wound up indulg-

ing in the odd Land art piece or

two: valuable autobiographical

information deleted, at the last in-stance, from my book on Richard

Long’s seminal A Line Made by

Walking . And who wouldn’t want

to see an exhibition of Jens

Hoffmann’s late early drawings?

2. Read the entire article at

http://www.afterall.org/online/

artists-at-work-willem-de-rooij.



15

Response I

practice. Didn’t de Rooij’s installation resemble an exhibition, after all? In a

subsequent email exchange with the artist, he referred to the unruly complex

of the curatorial/curatorship/curating as “the C-word,” and as it sounded

exactly like the unspeakable, it was thereafter left unspoken throughout.

Needless to add here that I did not for a minute doubt the soundness of

the artist’s reasons for resisting, or at the very least discouraging, a discussionof his project—the result of long years of passionate artistic research—in

the overly professionalized, managerial terms of contemporary curatorial dis-

course (which, to be sure, I often end up resenting just as much, if not much

more). But I could not help wondering what was so profoundly wrong with

curating that it required being referred to as “the C-word.” Is this how art-

ists speak among themselves about the curatoriat—“those c*******”? What’s

wrong with—or rather, what’s the problem with—curating? Fear of curating,

hatred of curating, some disdain, some distrust, some resentment? Some of

it is easily explained. Following the logic of Anton Vidokle’s polemical article

“Art Without Artists” (published in e-ux journal no. 16 in spring 2010) to its

grim conclusion, the global curatoriat could easily be perceived as an intricate

conspiracy whose ultimate aim is to produce “art without artists”—a world

with art in it still, but produced by curators, not artists.

Whether I agree or disagree with Vidokle’s claims (some, such as the last

one, mildly preposterous indeed, but then again so many more preposter-

ous things have been claimed in the name of the curatorial) is hardly to the

point, and I fear that my introduction to the present essay, in which I admit

to dreaming of a book that begins by saying “There really is no such thing as

an artist. There is only Art,” will only serve to fuel the re of Vidokle’s cen-tral suspicion anyway: that we, the curators, are really only in it to take over

from you, the artists. And to a certain extent he is right. I do dream of art

without artists. But I also dream (do I ever!) of art without curators. In short,

I dream—not all the time, but very often, or often enough—of art instead of

the art world . For that, I think, is the problem of a debate that seems to revolve

around questions of power only, or power rst and foremost: empowerment,

disempowerment, who’s more powerful than who, who’s less powerful than

who. These questions only help to accelerate the gradual disappearance of

art behind something called the art world.3

And what is the art world anyway? At a conference on curatorial practice

organized in the Canadian Rocky Mountain resort town of Banff last fall, I

wrote down the following wise words as they issued from the mouth of Paul

Chaat Smith, a curator at the National Museum of the American Indian:

“The art world doesn’t exist. It’s just a bunch of people hanging out doing

stuff.” This “stuff ” they do is, of course, Art. Some make it, and of course this

is how and where it all begins, how and where it always begins. Others com-

ment on it, yet others sell it or collect it, and many organize exhibitions of it.

This all happens in ways that may indeed resemble artistic activity properly

3. I have treated this issue in

greater depth in an essay pub-

lished online, in the same issue of

e-flux journal that featured Anton

Vidokle’s “Art Without Artists.”

See my “(Jena Revisited) Ten

Tentative Tenets” at http://www.e-

flux.com/journal/view/137. In that

essay I single out one particularly

problematic manifestation of thisincreasing conflation of contem-

porary art with the contemporary

art world: the vast quantities of art

made “about” the art world—an

inflationary category that also

includes most art-about-art.

Needless to say, the boundless

profusion, in recent times, of

meta-curatorial discourse is as

much part of this problem as the

hypertrophy of referentiality in

art, and this present essay is no

exception. In writing about the art

world, I am only too aware that I

should really be writing about art

instead. All I can do is call for the

former to cease and desist, and

the latter to be revalued.



16

The Exhibitionist

speaking, just like certain artistic activities may indeed resemble other types

of practices that belong to art’s general, ever-expanding orbit, which includes

organizing exhibitions, buying and selling art, writing about art, everything

that may give rise to the lazy, profoundly misguided impression that there are

also artists without art out there.

This may be due to my naïveté perhaps, or to a blindness I can afford toindulge in because of the relative comforts of my position as a museum cura-

tor, a position that blinds me to the possibility that, yes, perhaps I do wield

some power over certain “others” within this orbit, if only because of the

institutional security from which I’m able to operate. But I have real difculty

in conceiving of this positively confused state of affairs as a source of anxiety.

In fact it’s one of the few forms of confusion that I’ve come to wholeheart-

edly embrace over the years. This is not so much because I am convinced

that status (or territorial) anxiety is something that aficts only those who

believe in status (or territory), for I am prone to suffer from it as much as the

next person. It is because, in this confused gathering around the great subject

of Art, I have decided to be anxious about other things instead. Not about

whether this is a good artist or that a good curator (because in this respect I

am inclined to stick to the historical diagnosis of the “death of the subject,”

whether artist or curator; rather than believe in stable identities, I’d like to

believe in unstable activities). But about whether this is a good work of art or

that a good exhibition. In some cases, the work of art may indeed resemble an

exhibition, or the exhibition may indeed resemble a work of art, in which case

the only question that really matters remains: Is it a good work of art and/or

a good exhibition, and has the progressive erosion of categorical differencebetween the two been a force for this admittedly elusive good? Will the cause

of art be furthered by it?

I admit, in conclusion, that concluding with such grandiose statements

and casual talk of “good art” (good artworks, good exhibitions, the good) is

like opening a can of worms at the tail end of a dinner party thrown by the

International Society for Scoleciphobes. What is the cause of art, anyway,

and why must it be furthered? However, I do believe (and not just in the

religious sense!) that the question of quality is integral to the discussion of

art, and quality is something that can only be located in discrete objects such

as works of art and exhibitions and art projects. It cannot be located in the

eeting half-identities that are people or practices. Quality is that which per-

sists, and it is disingenuous for an artist, critic, or curator to state that such

persistence—which should under no circumstances be confused with a notion

of permanence, let alone immortality—is of no interest to us. It is the very

discussion of quality, of what is good and what is not (rather than who made

and/or appropriated what), ever evolving and always renegotiated, that con-

stitutes the subject of, or such a thing as, art.



17

Response I

In this essay I would like to introduce a series of reections aimed at under-

standing what we can do to a work of art—that is, how we can understand

and dene the legitimacy of a certain interpretation and presentation of an

artwork. What I would like to gure out—to paraphrase the title of a recent

book by Dorothea von Hantelmann—is not how to do things with art, but

how to do things to art. The underlying question here is whether the artwork

itself is what sets the boundaries, authorizing a series of interpretations and

uses as justiable, while excluding others.

The question is a crucial one for a curator. I do not want to outline a

deontological system for our profession, or draw up a list of rules about what

should and shouldn’t be done to artworks. But I do want to try to get a better

idea of where artworks stand within our value system, what our role is in rela-

tion to them, and to what degree we should respect the autonomy of variousplayers in the art game.

The title of this essay is borrowed from a seminal work by the philoso-

pher Umberto Eco. Eco has devoted many books to dening the limits of

interpretation, waging a crusade against deconstructive criticism. Although

he got his start as the leading theorist of the “open work,” Eco has spent the

more mature stage of his career defending the rights of the artwork, attempt-

ing to trace its borders, as if to caution that a work’s openness doesn’t mean

it is innite and receptive to any interpretation. Maintaining that the rights

of the reader have been overstressed in recent years, Eco has delineated a

hermeneutic model in which the intention of the artwork is the main focus.

Above all, he has tried to distinguish between interpretation and over-inter-

pretation, between interpretation and use—“use” implying the distortion or

misappropriation of an artwork’s meaning.

I feel I should state explicitly that in many ways I consider myself a fairly

conservative curator, although I have done some rather odd things to art-

works over the course of my career, for instance presenting them in unortho-

dox contexts, like the miniature Wrong Gallery, or in settings overcharged

THE LIMITS OF

INTERPRETATION

Massimiliano Gioni



18

The Exhibitionist

with the scars and traces of history, as at the 2006 Berlin Biennale or in the

Trussardi Foundation’s many exhibitions in public spaces and abandoned

palazzi . On one occasion, the details of which I don’t plan to disclose, I com-

pletely invented an artist and an artwork (with the complicity of an artist

and another curator). At other times, I have reconstructed entire artworks

that were lost, such as Gino De Dominicis’s The Second Solution of Immortality (1972, presented at the 2006 Frieze Art Fair in the Wrong Gallery booth),

or entire exhibitions, as with Mike Kelley’s The Uncanny (1993, presented at

the 2010 Gwangju Biennale). Recently I incorporated objects that were not

artworks—as readymades—into an exhibition that was structured as a sort of

giant ethnographic museum.

Each time that I’ve made choices such as these, I have asked myself

whether they were justiable, and whether the artworks presented in those

contexts really suggested and allowed for that type of presentation. If I de-

cided to follow through on the ideas, it’s because I believed the artwork itself

would come out the richer, with new possible interpretations—interpretations

that were, so to speak, contained in the work and not imposed on it. In other

words, even when I’ve done something particularly bizarre, it was because I

believed that that artwork authorized that reading and that manner of pre-

sentation. Or, rather, because I believed the seed of that interpretation was

already lying dormant within the artwork.

One needn’t go as far as the extreme cases described above to see that

any presentation of an artwork is an act of interpretation. Deciding to ar-

range work chronologically rather than thematically is a clear interpretive

choice, just as the decision to place one artist’s work next to another’s is achoice that expresses various explicit or implicit interpretations of the artists,

the works, and art history.

The question of limits on the interpretation of artworks is also closely

linked to the role and position of the curator. In the rst issues of The Exhibi-

tionist , the idea of the curator as an author seemed to be gaining ground. As

I said to Jens Hoffmann after reading his rst editorial, I don’t identify with

this notion at all. I think that things are both simpler and more complicated:

I like to think of the curator as being an interpreter, a model reader, at most

an editor, but not an author.

Or, rather, a curator is an author in the same way that someone who says

“That’s a gorgeous dog” is the author of that sentence. But if by “author”

we mean something closer to “artist,” then I think that “author” is a pretty

misleading way to describe the role of a curator.

By this I don’t mean to devalue my profession or put a leash on my

ego. Acknowledging that curators are interpreters does not detract from their

skill or creativity, it just means acknowledging that unlike authors, who have

total freedom, curators must reckon with the artwork; their freedom must



19

Response I

be dened and limited by the work or works they are dealing with in

their practice.

Please note that I am talking about the artwork, not the artist. At the risk

of alienating all the artists I’ve worked with in the past and will work with in

the future, I’d like to go on record as saying that I don’t think an artist has

greater rights or qualications than me when it comes to interpreting—andthus presenting—his or her work. In a system like the current one, where the

market is a driving force in the life and career of many artists, the artist’s voice

is unfortunately seen as the absolute, ultimate truth, not only with regard to

the “meaning” of the work, but even in relation to the “right” way of present-

ing it, distributing it, and preserving it.

It is interesting to observe how contemporary art, in the end, is a very

conservative eld; even though we’ve all read—or pretend to have read—

Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, we live and work in a system where the

author is anything but dead. The author is the lord and master. How many

times, after requesting the loan of a work, have you received instructions on

its presentation that are worthy of a military handbook, stipulating where,

when, and in what sequence it must be installed? And how many times has

an artist, or the artist’s dealer, tried to correct your press release or essay, as

if their interpretation was the only possible one? Many contemporary artists

believe they are the only people who can determine what their work means

and how it should be presented, and quite simply, I think they’re wrong. 1

I would like to remind all subscribers to the idea of univocal, indivis-

ible truth—and there are plenty of them, especially in Chelsea—that we are

in the interpretation business, and that many of us came to art because wethought of it as a realm where interpretation would be not only welcomed,

but encouraged and supported as a quintessential freedom. Not in the sense

that one could do or say anything with a work of art, but in the sense that an

artwork does not come with only one single possible interpretation.

At the cost of reasserting the obvious, I think that my task as a curator

lies in providing situations that allow a given artwork to emerge in a new

light, with a new interpretation, because it has been put into a new system of

relationships with other objects. These relationships can be created between

artworks by the same artist, or between works by different artists, or even

between a work and a given exhibition setting. Not to thrust the artwork into

such new situations means the artwork will be reduced to a mere tautology (a

risk that seems pervasive at many of our museums and exhibitions, where the

work is simply presented as itself, at most as a masterpiece, encapsulated in a

presumedly neutral setting).

As a curator and interpreter, I believe I have the right and the duty to

postulate new interpretations and placements of works, even when these dis-

tinctly clash with the artist’s desires. How to convince the artist to agree to

1. I would like to clarify that I’ve

learned a lot by working closely

with artists, because artists often

know their own work inside out.

But they know it inside out the

way a critic who has spent a

lifetime studying it would know

it. That is, they know it because

they’ve spent days, years, install-

ing it and presenting it, not simplybecause they’ve created it. I feel

it is important to specify this

point, as I am not advocating for

an “art without artists,” to use the

title of a recent article by Anton

Vidokle (e-flux journal no. 16,

May 2010). In that article, with his

typical overtly simplistic Man-

ichaeism, Vidokle tries to warn

readers about a bureaucratic drift

in curatorial practice that has led

to the removal of the artists from

the production and distribution of

art, in favor of a more streamlined

and sterilized art world in which

artists are reduced to simple

providers of objects and content.

Obviously, defending the right

of interpretation does not mean

that I want to supplant the role of

the artist as creator. But I do want

to preserve the right of the inter-

preter to introduce new ideas and

new interpretations, even when

they do not encounter the favor of

the artist. In fact, I am advocating

for a less bureaucratic and much

freer exchange.



20

The Exhibitionist

such things is a pragmatic and political question, and in fact has nothing to

do with the limits of interpretation, my own rights, the rights of the artist, or

the rights of the work.

A curator’s relationship with an artist, after all, is based on affection,

curiosity, engagement, politics, diplomacy, and two-bit psychology. Probably,

as long as art exists, artists and curators will have to heatedly or submissivelyargue about how artworks should be presented, one party always asking for

the permission and authorization of the other. But these relationships fall be-

tween the legal and the personal, and should have nothing to do with the sci -

ence (or perhaps I should say the art) of interpretation. Instead I believe that

the work of art can impose its own interpretation, or a spectrum of possible

interpretations. If this is the case, then artists can also rest easy in the knowl-

edge that their works are protected by their integrity. Or, to quote Umberto

Eco, “The limits of interpretation coincide with the rights of the text (which

does not mean with the rights of its author).”2

Now that we have rapidly done away with the question of the “author’s

intention,” I would like to discuss a series of particular cases in which artists

have taken on the role of curator.

For reasons that are not yet clear to me, but which I instinctively accept,

we are accustomed to allowing certain curatorial solutions from artists that

would instantly cost many professional curators their jobs, or at least their

credibility. Marcel Duchamp suggesting, with his enviable aplomb, that Peggy

Guggenheim simply slice a few inches off a Jackson Pollock painting to make

it t into her apartment is perhaps the most obvious demonstration that artists

are permitted to violate not only the limits of interpretation of an object, buteven its physical boundaries.

And one could cite a few dozen other particularly adventurous curatorial

choices of Duchamp’s, such as the threads strung all around the paintings in

the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in New York in 1942. The history of

Surrealism and Dada is full of exhibitions in which the installation concept

muscled in on the artworks, even impeding their visibility and altering their

physical appearance. Other particularly innovative exhibitions by artists in

the last half-century include those by Richard Hamilton and the Independent

Group, such as Parallel of Life and Art (1953), in which works of art, reproduc-

tions, and found objects were intertwined in immersive environments. In the

1960s there was the now-legendary Raid the Ice Box 1 (1969), curated by Andy

Warhol, who selected umbrellas, dresses, utensils, shoes, clothes, and artworks

from the collection of the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of

Design and arranged them in cabinets as commodities in a shop.

Group Material’s archive exhibitions in the 1980s presented a new de-

nition of authorship by combining everyday objects and artworks by several

artists. The resulting presentations often blurred the distinction between art-

2. Umberto Eco, The Limits of

Interpretation (Bloomington,

Indiana: Indiana University Press,

1990): 7.



21

Response I

work and document, effectively turning artifacts into art, and artworks into

relics. More recently, Mike Kelley combined medical instruments, hyper-

realist sculptures, and reproductions of artworks in the 1993 exhibition The

Uncanny. And, last but not least, one could mention the way that Urs Fischer

overlapped copies and original artworks in his curated exhibition Who’s Afraid

of Jasper Johns? (2008), which turned the entire show into a hall of mirrors. Speaking of overlaps, I was particularly struck by a picture I saw recently

of an installation by the Dutch artist Lily van der Stokker at the Van Abbe-

museum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, in 2008. In one of the rooms, the

artist—who had been invited to install works from the permanent collection

as part of the exhibition series Plug In —hung a Donald Judd piece in the

middle of one of her own wallpaper pieces. This is actually an approach that

she had experimented with in the past (though not using Judd) and which

has inuenced the work of other curators, particularly Eric Troncy and his

fabulous show Dramatically Different , held at Le Magasin in Grenoble, France,

in 1997. At the Van Abbemuseum, perhaps because she chose a work by a

particularly orthodox artist such as Judd, or perhaps because the installation

was in a museum setting, with the blessing of the institution and curators, I

found this display truly remarkable for its audacity.

When I look at installation choices such as Lily van der Stokker’s, I usu-

ally nd myself wondering, “Could I do that too?” The “could I” is not a

question of ethics. Nor fear, nor caution. Rather, it is a question about my role

as a curator, the limits of interpretation, and the boundaries of the artwork.

The question is not whether it’s right or not to hang a Judd on someone else’s

wallpaper. I rmly believe that it is, and if the Judd Foundation were to sueLily van der Stokker or the Van Abbemuseum, I’d be the rst to sign a peti-

tion in their defense.

What’s important to me here is not celebrating the irreverent power of

artists and the shows they curate, although I am naturally a huge fan of all the

exhibitions I’ve cited, Lily van der Stokker’s included. What I would like to g-

ure out, and I don’t think I have a denitive answer yet, is whether that piece

by Donald Judd in the Lily van der Stokker exhibition can still be considered

a work by Judd. Is it a work that has gained a signicant new interpretation?

Has it simply been reduced to—transformed into, rather—a work by Lily van

der Stokker or a prop in an installation of hers? Or is it some strange hybrid?

In short, are we looking at a new interpretation of a work, or as Eco would

say an obvious case of over-interpretation or use? Eco tells us that anyone can

“use” a text to serve purposes that are not foreseen by the text itself, but that

this is a violation of its boundaries—a violation that may lead to new, creative

solutions, but which in the end tells us nothing new or important about the

text. To offer an overly simplistic example: I can pick up a Bible and heave it

at someone I’m annoyed with, if I like, but that action—that use—isn’t going



22

The Exhibitionist

to help me understand the Bible.

Perhaps for the very reason that I see my role as a curator as one of

interpretation and not authorship, I believe the limits of interpretation lie

within the work. My responsibility is to make the work say what the work

wanted to say: in a new language or with a new strength, perhaps, by placing

it in a chorus of unexpected voices; or with a louder voice, by putting it into anew environment that bears up some nuances more than others or that even

threatens to render the work unrecognizable. There is quite a bit of room

inside an artwork, a vast space that accommodates multiple and varied read -

ings, even unexpected ones, and allows for even the most offbeat interpreta-

tions. But my work as a curator should stop short of the point where the voice

of the artwork begins to be drowned out by my own.



23

The Exhibitionist

RESPONSE II

TOWARD A HISTORY

OF EXHIBITIONS

Julian Myers

Teresa Gleadowe

Christian Rattemeyer



24

The Exhibitionist

In her introduction to Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology, the curator and

art historian Florence Derieux asserts, “It is now widely accepted that the art

history of the second half of the twentieth century is no longer a history of

artworks, but a history of exhibitions.”1 Articulated in the pages of one of the

most visible publications in a wave of recent scholarship around Szeemann,

such wide acceptance has become increasingly hard to dispute.2 One need

only take in the frequent restaging in institutions of historical exhibitions

(Artists Space’s 2001 “fragmentary re-creation” of Douglas Crimp’s 1977

exhibition Pictures is a signal example);3 the establishment and prolifera-

tion of courses devoted to this history in curatorial training programs and

universities; a new pitch in academic study of the history of art away from

monographic studies and toward essays on exhibitions; and a raft of new

publications, from the modest to the monumental. Scanning my bookshelf, alongside Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology

sits the 2007 catalogue raisonné of Szeemann’s exhibitions titled Harald Szee-

mann: with by through because towards despite: Catalogue of All Exhibitions 1957–2005 ;

Bruce Altshuler’s Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions That Made Art History, 1863–1959,

of which the rst volume emerged in 2008; Hans Ulrich Obrist’s 2008 col-

lection of interviews with individual curators, A Brief History of Curating ; and

Afterall’s inaugural volume (published in 2010) of a series of exhibition his-

tories, beginning with Christian Rattemeyer’s Exhibiting the New Art: Op Losse

Schroeven and When Attitudes Become Form, 1969. Their bibliographies reveal that

this new preoccupation emerges largely from European publishing houses;

Harald Szeemann’s name, threaded through their pages, makes it hard to dis-

tinguish this new area of historical study from the hagiography of one man.

Leave aside that this consolidation of reputation has occurred around When

Attitudes Become Form (1968), an exhibition that, unlike his later trio Bachelor

Machines (1975), Monte Verità (1978), and Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk (1983),

might not actually guarantee such claims for historical importance.4 Pile on

compilations dealing with curating more generally, which sometimes embark

ON THE VALUE OF

A HISTORY OF EXHIBITIONS

Julian Myers

1. Florence Derieux, “Introduc-

tion” in Harald Szeemann:

Individual Methodology (Zurich:

JRP Ringier, 2007): 8.

2. See this affirmed, for example,

by the curator Christophe Cherix

in his introduction to Hans Ulrich

Obrist’s A Brief History of Curating

(Zürich and Dijon: JRP Ringier

and Les presses du réel, 2008),

for example, or in more qualified

prose by Teresa Gleadowe in her

introduction in Exhibiting the New

Art: Op Losse Schroeven and When

Attitudes Become Form, 1969

(London: Afterall, 2010): 8–11.

3. See Jenelle Porter’s essay

“ Pictures at an Exhibition” in The

Exhibitionist no. 2. Other examplesinclude a 2008 reinstallation at

Zwirner & Wirth of Dan Flavin’s

1964 exhibition at the Green Gal-

lery; artist Mario Garcia Torres’s

2008 “reproduction” of the 1969

exhibition 9 at Castelli at the CCA

Wattis Institute for Contemporary

Arts in San Francisco; the Los

Angeles County Museum of Art’s

New Topographics: Photographs of

a Man-Altered Landscape, a repris-

ing by Edward Robinson in 2009

of the 1975 exhibition at George

Eastman House in Rochester; and

Sol Lewitt: A Mercer Union Legacy

Project , organized by Sarah Robayo

Sheridan at Mercer Union in

Toronto in 2010.

4. I should admit to my complicity

in this, having produced for After-

all an essay on Szeemann’s 1983

exhibition The Tendency Towards

the Total Artwork (see “Totality:

A Guided Tour,” Afterall 20, 2009:

100–107) as well as an edited

volume on same: HSz: As is/As if

(San Francisco: California College

of the Arts, 2010).



25

Response II

on historical studies of this kind, and whose value varies from one author to

the next: Thinking About Exhibitions (1996), What Makes a Great Exhibition? (2007),

Curating Subjects (2007), The Biennial Reader (2010), et cetera. Five years ago this

shelf would have been sparsely populated indeed; now its joints creak under

the weight.

Yet wide acceptance of an assertion does not demonstrate its veracity, orexplain the reasons such a momentous shift may have occurred, or explore its

implications for the myriad objects, institutions, relationships, and exchanges

that make up the eld of contemporary art and exhibitions. Which is simply

to say that the work of critical thinking on this momentous “turn” in the study

of art remains before us. So, what gives? One might see this development as

part and parcel of a culture newly attentive to “extras” and supplements of all

kinds, for example the current fad in music for bonus tracks, or in movies for

making-of documentaries and commentaries. Following this line of thinking,

the history of exhibitions might be merely a secondary effect of an academic,

institutional, and para-institutional discourse about art, in desperate pursuit

of “added values” of its own (followed in quick succession with “education”

or some such, ad innitum).5

As my introductory quote suggests, though, this ambiguous surplus is

now dreaming of hegemony. A sustained analysis of institutions of art (muse-

ums and galleries)—which post-Althusserian inquiry still largely saw itself as a

supplement to the history of art—has given way something more triumphant,

autonomous, and central, but as yet more difcult to pin down: a history of

exhibitions.6 One might object that such a history would be a contradiction in

terms, for of course exhibitions have been one primary infrastructure or ap-paratus in modernity for producing and mediating historical knowledge. That

such infrastructures have themselves become common objects of historical

attention in the academy (say, the history of history) will not completely dispel

a suspicion that this is in some fatal way a meta-conversation, academic in the

worst way.

It will already be evident from my title that I don’t fully agree with this

assessment. One of the strengths of historical inquiry is to make such mediat-

ing frameworks contingent and visible as one possibility among others—not

just to explain but to denature the present. And indeed it turns out that exhibi-

tions are not some ineffable infrastructure at all, but that they are something

historical. They appeared at a particular moment, designed to answer a cer-

tain set of specic historical conditions. Forms of display go very deep into

human social behavior, from the display of medieval relics to cave paintings

and beyond, but the “exhibition” as such was invented in the Enlightenment

in Western Europe, as a new form of publicness for a new sort of audience.

Listen, for example, to the French painter Jacques-Louis David, who argued

for this new public format in a pamphlet published on the occasion of his

5. See Diedrich Diederichsen on

Marx’s theory of Mehrwert in On

(Surplus) Value in Art: Reflections

01 (Rotterdam and Berlin: Witte

de With and Sternberg Press,

2008): 21–31; also my “Art History

as Added Value,” SFMOMA Open

Space, July 20, 2009 (http://blog.

sfmoma.org/2009/07/art-history-

as-added-value/).

6. Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the

White Cube: The Ideology of the

Gallery Space (first published in

Artforum in 1976, then later col-

lected by UC Press in 2000) is a

good example of this.



26

The Exhibitionist

1799 exhibition at the National Palace of the Sciences and the Arts (I hope

the reader will forgive me for quoting at length):

For a painter the custom of exhibiting his works before the eyes of his fellow citizens, in

return for which they make individual payment, is not new…. In our own time this cus-

tom of showing the arts to the public is practiced in England and is called Exhibition. The

pictures of the death of General Wolf and of Lord Chatham, painted by our contem-

porary [Benjamin] West, and shown by him, won him immense sums. The custom of

exhibition existed long before this, and was introduced in the last century by [Anthony]

Van Dyck; the public came in crowds to admire his work; he gained by this means a

considerable fortune. Is this not an idea as just as it is wise, which brings to art the means

of existing for itself, of supporting itself by its own resources, thus to enjoy the noble in-

dependence suited to genius, without which the re that inspires it is soon extinguished?

On the other hand, could there be a more dignied and honorable means of gaining a

share of the fruit of his labors than for an artist to submit his works to the judgment of

the public and to await the recompense that they will wish to make him. If his work is

mediocre, public opinion will soon mete out justice to it. The author, acquiring neither

glory nor material reward, would learn by hard experience ways of mending his faults

and capturing the attention of the spectators by more happy conceptions.7

This is soon after the “celestial-infernal events” of the French Revolution and

the Reign of Terror.8 David, called by some the “Robespierre of the brush,”

had been imprisoned for his enthusiastic involvement as a propagandist and

pageant master in the radical Jacobin government.9 The artwork he planned

to show, The Intervention of the Sabine Women, was his rst major work after his

release. In the new Republican France, he could no longer count on the pa-

tronage of the church (he’d repudiated it), the Royal Academy (as a memberof the Directorate, he’d liquidated it; the exhibition was in its former hall),

or the aristocracy (whose executions he’d witnessed and supported). “Exhibi-

tion” was called up to answer his predicament as a new citizen of the Repub-

lic: For whom was his art now intended? And a connected question: How can

an artist support himself in these unfamiliar circumstances?

For the Classicist painter, all things led inexorably to the example of

Greece. David quotes Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy’s Voyage du jeune Anar -

charsis (1787), which referred to a “habit of public exhibition of paintings”

among the Greeks. More proximate examples are the bourgeois exhibiting

societies founded by artists in England in the 18th century: the Society ofArts, Manufactures and Commerce, out of which developed the Society of

Artists of Great Britain, and then the dissident Free Society of Artists. (Their

fractious dealings later led to the founding of the Royal Academy of Arts in

London.) These societies imagined their “new practice” of temporary public

exhibitions as both educational and entrepreneurial—an enterprise that early

on came to include charging a shilling at the door.10 This new model, David

implores, “brings to art the means of existing for itself, of supporting itself

7. Jacques-Louis David, “The

Painting of the Sabines” in From

the Classicists to the Impres-

sionists: Art and Architecture in

the 19th Century , ed. Elizabeth

Gilmore Holt (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1986): 5.

8. Thomas Carlyle, quoted by

Richard Wagner at the beginningof his essay “Art and Revolution”

in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works,

Volume 1: The Art-Work of the

Future, trans. William Ashton Ellis

(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Küb-

ner & Co., Ltd., 1895): 23.

9. Holt, From the Classicists , 2.

10. Described as such on Febru-

ary 26, 1760, by Francis Hayman,

chairman of the Society of Arts,

Manufactures and Commerce.

Originally compiled by Edward

Edwards, and cited at length in

Algernon Graves, The Society of

Artists of Great Britain 1760–1791;

The Free Society of Artists

1761–1783 (London: G. Bell and

Sons), 303.



27

Response II

by its own resources, thus to enjoy the noble independence suited to genius.”

And indeed the painter’s ambitions were realized. This exhibition earned him

acclaim and his own “considerable fortune.”

Let me sum up. First, I would argue that “the exhibition” as such has a

history, and this is when it began—not, as Derieux maintains, in the second

half of the 20th century, though her periodization suggests that radical shiftsin the practice of art in this moment emphasized the importance of mapping

this history.11 And second, that the history of art is unintelligible without such

a consideration of the artwork’s public life, as hereafter mediated by the dreams

and practicalities of exhibition making. Already, then, we see the peculiar

combination of public virtue and marketplace ambitions native to exhibition

making. So too does there appear, even in this early moment, the exhibition’s

task of calling its public into being (far too often it’s imagined the other way

around). David placed his faith in constituencies among the emergent bour-

geoisie who might, or might not, support and legitimate his work: “If his work

is mediocre, public opinion will soon mete out justice to it.” Far from being

taken for granted, this new constituency had to be seduced, or persuaded

(this was the evident aim of David’s pamphlet), which predicts the sorts of

anxiety and consternation about the dangers of public judgment that haunt

contemporary practices of exhibition making and art making—for Catherine

David no less than Jacques-Louis.12 Not for nothing did some among the 20th

century avant-gardes ee into obscurity, privacy, or bohemia.13

The crucial task of a history of exhibitions, then, would be to attend to

this particular constellation—a desired autonomy, the social situation of the

artist, institutions, the market, and the public—as they assumed new relation-ships over time, in and through practice.

Of course, no one would care if the work at the center of this array had

not itself been worth looking at—if David’s sense of his audience, and the

situation of his painting’s public life, had not transformed the form of the work

itself, from its scale and pictorial organization to its fervid hyperrealism to the

costumes of its women. As Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has amply demonstrated,

the work makes no sense without knowing the conditions of its exhibition.14

But the reverse is true as well. Severed from an account of the painting,

David’s attenuated situating and inventing would not count for much, and

would fade into mere maneuvering and publicity.

What, then, is to be the value of an ascendant history of exhibitions, as

somehow distinct from a history of artworks? Speaking as an art historian,

I nd Derieux’s distinction overstated: The history of art is the history of

exhibitions, and vice versa. But in my experience, too much of the writing in

the emerging subeld—and I am not excluding The Exhibitionist and my own

efforts—stops short at precisely the moment of turning to the works at hand;

a phobia of artworks seems to be the cost of a fetishization of exhibitions.

11. Erica Levin and Danny

Marcus, for example, confirm

Derieux’s intuition: “In recent

decades, however, the produc-

tion of exhibitions on-site has

become at least as important as

studio practice, if not more so;

and though galleries continue to

serve as vendors of art objects,

curators have come to occupya pivotal role in the economy of

art’s production, exhibition and

exchange. Artists who base their

practice on exhibition-making

are bound more than ever to or-

ganize their working lives around

exhibition spaces.” See Levin

and Marcus, “Elegant Obstinacy,

Meaningless Work” in We Have as

Much Time as It Takes, eds. Julian

Myers and Joanna Szupinska (San

Francisco: CCA Wattis Institute

for Contemporary Arts, 2010): 23.

Terry Smith’s What Is Contem-

porary Art? (Chicago: University

Press, 2009) also corroborates

Derieux’s periodization.

12. I have in mind the recur-

ring unease about audience and

populism articulated by Benjamin

Buchloh, Catherine David,

and Jean-François Chevrier in

“1960–1997: The Political Poten-

tial of Art, Part 1 & 2” in Politics,

Poetics: Documenta X: The Book

(Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Docu-

menta and Cantz Verlag, 1997):

374–403, 624–43.

13. On this see Boris Groys,“Critical Reflections” in Art Power

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008):

111–18.

14. See “The Revolution Glacée”

in Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Necklines:

The Art of Jacques-Louis David

After the Terror (New Haven,

Connecticut: Yale University Press,

1999).



28

The Exhibitionist

Which is to say that this writing, whatever its value, too often demurs from the

work of building (to quote the art historian T. J. Clark) “the connecting links

between artistic form, the available systems of visual representation, the cur-

rent theories of art, other ideologies, social classes, and more general historical

structures and processes.”15 It politely refrains from attending to the historical

mediations between these different spheres, or providing an “account of theirchange and ambiguity.”16 If our contemporary xation on exhibitions hopes

to be something more than anecdote, confession, half-encrypted publicity, or

half-abstracted meta-discourse—that is, if it aspires to become a history—

then these will be the tasks before us.

15. T. J. Clark, “On the Social His-

tory of Art” in Image of the People:

Gustave Courbet and the 1848

Revolution (London: Thames and

Hudson, 1973): 13.

16. Ibid.



29

Response II

INHABITING

EXHIBITION HISTORY

Teresa Gleadowe

The current interest in exhibition histories has its roots in artists’ practice.

The conceptual shifts that took place in the late 1960s eventually resulted

in an understanding of the exhibition itself as a creative entity—a Gesamt-

kunstwerk , dispositif , or medium—as well as an interpretative frame or lens. For

the last four decades artists have been working in response to site, or, later,

institutional context, audience, or community. They have appropriated ob-

jects and activities from beyond the traditional eld of art and absorbed the

mechanisms of exhibition display into their own creative vocabulary. Indeed

the artist’s “work” now often comprises decisions and processes that would

once have been described as entirely “curatorial.” The roles of artist and cu-

rator have sometimes converged and the artist-curator has become a familiar

gure in the exhibition landscape. One high-prole example of this is the se-

ries of exhibitions commissioned by Roger Malbert for the Hayward Touringprogram in England since 1995, which have been curated by artists such as

Michael Craig-Martin, Richard Wentworth, Susan Hiller, Tacita Dean, and,

most recently, Mark Wallinger.

These developments have their beginnings in the rst half of the 20th

century, in the work of Marcel Duchamp and his Surrealist contemporaries,

the environments constructed by El Lissitzky, the designs of Mies van der

Rohe, Lilly Reich, and Frederick Kiesler. They have outstanding exponents

in the second half of the 20th century in the work of such diverse protago-

nists as Richard Hamilton, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Joseph Beuys,

Donald Judd, and General Idea. And the active legacies of all these persist

in the present, in the work of artists such as Liam Gillick, Pierre Huyghe,

Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Goshka

Macuga, Martin Beck, and Walid Raad. In the past four decades these and

many other artists have made the exhibition their medium, transforming it

and vastly expanding its limits. In doing so they have made it clear that the his-

tory of contemporary art is inseparable from the history of its exhibitions.

On a more institutional level, the growing interest in the history of exhi-

bitions has been fanned by the development of curatorial programs such as



30

The Exhibitionist

those at the Royal College of Art (where the curating department of which I

was director was inaugurated in 1992) and at Bard College (where the gradu-

ate program in curatorial studies was initiated in 1994). Building on the pio-

neering work of the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and

L’Ecole in Grenoble, France, these academic programs took on the job of de-

ning a body of knowledge and delineating a professional eld. They did soby reference to recent and current art practice as much as to art history. The

growth of curatorial programs is thus linked to an interest in innovation in the

form of the exhibition, in contrast to the traditional art historical emphasis on

individual works of art. A knowledge of past exhibitions, and of the practices

and trajectories of exemplary exhibition makers, has come to be recognized

as a crucial way of describing the work of the curator and thus as an essential

aspect of the curriculum in curatorial courses.

Conversely, a fascination with the history of exhibitions could be seen

as a response to the fragmented and deregulated proliferation of curatorial

activity. As the number of independent or self-described curators has multi-

plied, as curatorial mechanisms have become more uid, as working patterns

have become less institutional, exhibition histories have gained recognition as

a way of delineating ethical and professional boundaries.

Perhaps as a result of these moves, exhibition history has also increas-

ingly come to be seen as an integral part of art history, employed to mark

successive “turns” in the production and reception of contemporary art. For

instance in the Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin

H. D. Buchloh magnum opus Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Post-

modernism, published in 2004, each chapter from mid-century onward is in-troduced by reference to an exhibition—from the rst Gutai exhibition in

Japan in 1955 to Utopia Station and Zone of Emergency at the Venice Biennale

in 2003.

It is worth recalling that at the beginning of the 1990s there was little

published research about 20th-century exhibition history, and what there was

had been done mostly in continental Europe, not in the English-speaking

world. In France the sociologist Nathalie Heinich had been conducting in-

novative sociological analyses of the eld of art and exhibitions since the

1980s. The art historian Walter Grasskamp rst began to research the history

of Documenta when he was working for the German art magazine Kunstforum

International between 1978 and 1983; he published his short essay “Mythos

Documenta” in Kunstforum in 1982. In 1988 the groundbreaking exhibition

Stationen der Moderne, presented at the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin, traced the

history of 20th-century exhibitions from Die Brücke at Galerie Arnold in Dres-

den in 1910 to Gerry Schum’s Land Art exhibition for his Fernsehgalerie in

1969. In the Netherlands the anthology Exposition Imaginaire: The Art of Ex-

hibiting in the Eighties, published in 1989, questioned a range of contemporary



31

Response II

1. I led the curating course at the

Royal College of Art from 1992

to 2006. These observations are

drawn from notes I made during

Michael Compton’s seminars.

curators on their attitudes to exhibition making in the last decade, providing

a barometer of curatorial thinking at that time, while the journal Kunst en

Museumjournaal included articles on exhibition making, collection building,

and collection displays, pioneering a reection on curatorial mores. In France

the Cahiers du Musée nationale d’art moderne also began to publish occasional

articles on curatorial subjects at the end of the 1980s. But none of this work was widely known, and it was not until the mid-

1990s that a cluster of publications on recent exhibition history began to ap-

pear on the international stage. Bruce Altshuler’s inuential The Avant-Garde

in Exhibition was published in 1994. Die Kunst der Ausstellung (an anthology of

essays on 30 exemplary 20th-century artists’ exhibitions, edited by Bernd

Klüser and Katharina Hegewisch) appeared in 1995. Thinking About Exhibi-

tions, the seminal anthology edited by Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson,

and Sandy Nairne, was published in 1996, and Mary Anne Staniszewski’s

The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Mod -

ern Art appeared in 1998. By the end of the decade Hans Ulrich Obrist was

beginning to speak about the need to correct “the prevalent amnesia about

museum and exhibition history,” referring to Staniszewski’s book.

In 1992, when the Royal College of Art curating course was launched,

none of this material was available. In the rst few years of the course it be-

came clear that, in the absence of a published history of exhibitions, there

would be a heavy reliance on visiting lecturers to contribute oral histories

and, in the words of the course prospectus, “to develop awareness of the

economic, social, political, and cultural conditions that frame the produc-

tion and reception of works of art.” When the curator Michael Compton(formerly head of exhibitions at the Tate Gallery in London) devised a series

of seminars in the rst years of the program’s existence, he chose to build his

teaching around specic case histories, taking these as exemplary of certain

key curatorial questions. For instance he asked of the concurrent 1969 exhibi-

tions Op Losse Schroeven and When Attitudes Become Form, “Do the catalogue es-

says written by the curators adequately dene the work that is in each show?

Do the texts present the shows in ways that make them understandable? Have

the selections made for these exhibitions in 1969 been ratied by the art world

in terms of selection for subsequent exhibitions? Is the political context of

the time reected in the exhibitions, and if so, how? How did these exhibi-

tions relate to private gallery shows and to the activities of the market at that

time?”1

Through such questions Compton introduced an opinionated insider’s

engagement with the achievements of his contemporaries. He expected stu-

dents to have knowledge of the eld, to have some familiarity with the refer-

ences that would be needed to make the comparisons he was seeking. He led

them to an appreciation of the way in which both exhibitions grew out of



32

The Exhibitionist

conversations with artists—and artists’ personal recommendations of other

artists—and thus located the curators at the heart of their artistic generation,

rather than at an academic distance from it. From here it was but a single

step for Compton to discuss exhibitions of new art as a curatorial genre that

makes particular demands on the relationship between curators and artists,

and to engage students in debating those professional and ethical demandsand dilemmas. Another seminar, devoted to his own curatorial management

of Robert Morris’s participatory installation at the Tate Gallery in 1971,

highlighted the curator’s distinct role and uneasy institutional responsibili-

ties. Compton’s account of the public’s enthusiastic physical engagement with

Morris’s installation—followed by his decision to recommend its premature

closure as a result of accidental injuries to visitors—demonstrated that a cura-

tor with a duty of care to the public cannot necessarily follow the path of the

artist in an institutional setting.

In her essay “What’s Important About the History of Modern Art Ex-

hibitions?” the art historian Martha Ward suggests that “One way to char -

acterize the period from 1750 to 1914 in relation to our own is that it occurs

prior to the articulation of any science or discourse of display.” She argues,

“Despite the appearance during this period of the institutions that are now

commonly taken to be synonymous with the creation of an autonomous

space for art (museums, art societies, salons, galleries) it’s nevertheless the case

that art installation was not yet a subject for professional discussion. Nor did

the dealers, administrators, entrepreneurs, or artists who mounted exhibitions

often aim to create startlingly innovative displays of art and so to engineer

new modes of visuality.”2

In Ward’s account, this discourse of display did notemerge until the 1920s, with the beginnings of historicized museum installa-

tions, the impact of the new American science of advertising, and the radical

interventions of artists, such as El Lissitsky’s at the Landesmuseum in Han-

nover, Germany. But of more immediate relevance here is the way in which

Ward emphasizes the importance of the questions we ask when addressing

exhibition history. She interrogates the ways in which exhibitions manage

relationships with the public sphere, the ways in which they function to repre-

sent some totality or entity larger than themselves, and the manner in which

they prepare or frame the experience of the viewer.

Ward’s observations are drawn from her knowledge of exhibition making

in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the questions she asks relate particularly

to this period. Rather different questions are required when dealing with the

history of exhibition making in the 20th century, especially in the period since

the late 1960s, when the work of art began to merge with the exhibition. At

this point, the form of interrogation needs to be animated by a viewpoint that

is closer to the approach of artists and curatorial practice than to traditional

art history. Michael Compton’s teaching was valuable not only because of his

2. Martha Ward,“What’s Impor-

tant about the History of Modern

Art Exhibitions?” in Thinking

About Exhibitions, eds. Reesa

Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson,

and Sandy Nairne (London:

Routledge, 1996).



33

Response II

deep knowledge of art history and museological issues, but also because of his

partisan engagement with the subjects at hand, his recognition that the prob-

lems posed by certain exhibitions are still of acute interest to contemporary

artists and exhibition makers, and that asking questions of past events can

extract new insights with respect to the future. The urgency of the questions

asked by curators or artists in relation to their own working methodologiescan reanimate exhibition histories, moving them into an active relationship

with contemporary art and exhibition making.

Speaking recently at a conference at the Banff Centre in Canada (at

which I was a participant), Ute Meta Bauer, associate professor and direc-

tor of the visual arts program at MIT, described the way the rst generation

of independent curators and artist–exhibition makers had initiated her own

generation of artists and curators into “a community of shared agency.” In

presenting her own act of “transmission,” an improvised performance us-

ing the old technologies of slide and overhead projection, she exemplied

the meaning of this history in terms of her own practice. By anecdote and

example she elaborated the ways in which artists’ use of the medium of ex-

hibition making—for instance the Independent Group’s This Is Tomorrow in

1956, Yves Klein’s Le Vide in 1958, Jean Tinguely’s Dylaby in 1962, Konrad

Lueg and Gerhard Richter’s Leben mit Pop in 1963, Gilbert and George’s Living

Sculpture in 1969, and Jannis Kounellis’s 12 horses in Galleria l’Attico in Rome

in 1969—gave sustenance to her work as an artist and curator. She demon-

strated that we learn from exhibition histories by the use we make of them.

There is no direct correlation between the desire to uncover exhibition

histories and the ability to learn from them. As in archaeology, the excite-ment of excavation can easily give way to cold processes of classication. The

opportunity to access primary materials, through archive and publication, is

immediately attractive, but the productiveness of our readings of past exhi-

bitions depends on the questions we ask of them, the knowledge we bring

to them, and the ways we work with them. The archive display about past

exhibitions, now becoming a staple of contemporary art institutions, tends

too often toward headlines and highlights, tokenistic samplings that leave the

viewer with the impression of familiarity but without the means or desire to

interrogate further. Such uses of the archive run the danger of producing a

sterile canon of “landmark” exhibitions that can be named and listed, but

are never actively interrogated or inhabited. Even exhibitions as widely ref -

erenced as Magiciens de la terre and When Attitudes Become Form suffer this false

familiarity, their frequent citation standing in for a deeper knowledge.

An exhibition is always more than the relics that survive it—more than

the catalogue, installation photographs, exhibition plans, posters, and other

marketing ephemera, the interviews, press reviews, and news reports, the oor

plans, exhibition les, and administrative records, the media responses, diary



34

The Exhibitionist

notes, video and audio recordings. All of these sources make vital contribu-

tions to an exhibition history, as demonstrated eloquently in Exhibiting the New

Art: Op Losse Schroeven and When Attitudes Become Form, 1969, the rst book in

Afterall’s new series devoted to exhibition histories. But, like a performance,

an exhibition is also a series of phenomenological experiences—elusive and

essentially irrecoverable. Perhaps it is the recognition of this quality above allthat makes it necessary to think about exhibition history not only as a product

of meticulous historical research, but also as a subject that needs to be illumi-

nated by artists and curators who wish to inhabit these histories and set them

to work.



35

Response II

In 1998, when I nished my master’s thesis at the Freie Universität Berlin

with a study of the exhibitions Op Losse Schroeven and When Attitudes Become

Form, I was told that my professor was not available for a PhD on the history

of exhibitions, as the topic was both too recent for historical analysis and too

far removed from the work of artists to be relevant. It was made clear to me

that I would have to go elsewhere, maybe to an English-speaking academic

environment. Three years later, in spring 2001, after completing my oral ex-

ams at Columbia University, a proposal to write a PhD thesis on formations

of group exhibitions after 1945 was greeted with the answer that writing the

history of curating would be akin to writing a history of exploitation, since

artists create, and curators exploit. Needless to say, I am still ABD.

Last year, I published an expanded, rewritten, and certainly more pol-

ished version of my thesis in English, with the London-based publisher After-all.1 The book, which also brings together substantial documents about both

exhibitions, including oor plans, installation photographs, original essays,

and interviews with some of the participating artists, bears little resemblance

to my rst attempt at writing a case study of two landmark exhibitions from

the late 1960s, although the basic lines of argument remain the same and

the basic idea of what these exhibitions might mean remains as valid today

as it was 12 years ago. More importantly, and more startlingly, maybe, is that

no other publication has appeared that addresses either of these exhibitions,

with the exception of a large archival tome that brings together all of Harald

Szeemann’s exhibitions.2 Over 12 years, in the context of a rapidly develop-

ing eld of academic research, publication, and discourse on the history of

curatorial practice, my thesis is still the most detailed account of these seminal

exhibitions.

Of course, these two shows might simply not have been the most pressing

subjects for further academic exploration over the last decade, when—rightly

so—a broadening of the canon of important exhibitions, not a solidication

of the primacy of late-1960s Western European curatorial practice, has been

WHAT HISTORY OF

EXHIBITIONS?


1. Christian Rattemeyer et al.,

Exhibiting the New Art: Op Losse

Schroeven and When Attitudes

Become Form, 1969 (London:

Afterall, 2010).

2. Tobia Bezzola and Roman

Kurzmeyer, eds., Harald

Szeemann: with by through

because towards despite

(New York/Vienna: Springer,

2007).



36

The Exhibitionist

the order of the day. But at the same time, the complete absence of further

critical discussion of what often are referred to as the canonical exhibitions of

the late 1960s—not to mention the origin myth of the independent curator

(in the gure of Szeemann)—is remarkable. All of this is simply to say that

the discrepancy between the perception and the reality of the coverage of the

history of exhibitions suggests the need for further inquiry. This is not to say that no research has been done. Since the rst broad

push to move exhibition history into the forefront of art historical study in

the early to mid-1990s with anthologies such as Bernd Klüser and Katha-

rina Hegewisch’s Die Kunst der Ausstellung (1991) and Reesa Greenberg, Bruce

W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne’s Thinking About Exhibitions (1996) as well as

academic studies such as Bruce Altshuler’s The Avant-Garde in Exhibition (1994),

several books have touched upon and expanded our knowledge of particular

exhibitions, for example Miwon Kwon’s One Place After Another (2002), which

in the context of a discussion of site-specicity includes a lengthy chapter on

the 1993 exhibition Culture in Action in Chicago.

But to claim that the history of exhibitions as an academic subject has

provided a particular fascination in recent years might be an overstatement.

Rather, I think, what has been described as a fascination with the history

of exhibitions really might be considered more accurately as a fascination

with the curatorial. It is at this point a well-worn cliché to state that curato-

rial studies have ourished in the past two decades. Graduate programs and

symposia, websites and anthologies have been developing for quite some time

to look at questions of the curatorial, and publications such as Paul O’Neill’s

Curating Subjects (2007) and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s A Brief History of Curating (2008) suggest that the fascination with the curatorial is in no small part a

fascination with the curator. To some extent, this has been understood and

rectied. In the case of Curating Subjects, O’Neill claims as a raison d’être for

the anthology the need to move forward from a focus on the curator to a focus

on his or her activity, from “an understanding of who certain curators are” to

“what they actually do” and to develop new vocabularies for these practices.3

But O’Neill is chiey concerned with a model of the curatorial that develops

exactly at the moment when the traditional object of the exhibition is compli-

cated, expanded, and potentially abandoned at the end of the 1960s, with a

mobilization of the traditional museum curator into roles such as that of the

Ausstellungsmacher (Szeemann, again).

So, while anthologies such as this actively complicate the debate around

the roles and functions of the curator, the question of the exhibition is only

occasionally raised, and then usually in relation to strategies of display, institu-

tional politics, and what might be called a taxonomy of genres of exhibitions.

Rarely are exhibition histories, or historical exhibitions more specically,

approached with the same degree of attention, descriptive and analytical

3. Paul O’Neill, “Introduction” in

Curating Subjects (London: Open

Editions, 2007): 12–13.



37

Response II

precision, or discursive innovation. Maybe it is useful to distinguish between

“histories of exhibitions” and “exhibition theory” on the one hand and simi-

lar elds of inquiry for curatorial studies. Curatorial practice and exhibitions

obviously share a relation, much like artistic practice and artworks do, but

they aren’t synonymous.

In fact, two central elements necessary to speak of a “history ofexhibitions”—however preliminary, incomplete, and ideologically fraught

such a history may be—are largely missing from today’s discourse. The rst

element in question concerns an accepted canon of important exhibitions,

even in the most general form. The second concerns a developed terminology

and methodology of scholarly description. Besides the previously mentioned

handful of anthologies published over the past few years, which provide brief

entries on important exhibitions of the past century, usually without a more

developed framework of how and why these exhibitions were selected, and

a bevy of internal lists kept by the various centers and departments of cura-

torial studies (having taught a class at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial

Studies on the subject of the history of exhibitions, I witnessed how these lists

changed over the semesters and years), there is no easily accessible and gener -

ally agreed upon trajectory of exhibitions to which we can refer.

More importantly, we are only at the very beginning of developing a ter-

minology and taxonomy of exhibition types—the solo show, the group show,

the thematic exhibition, the retrospective, the exhibition-as-publication, and

more recently the biennial, the exhibition-as-proposal, the social project, the

exhibition-as-performance/opera/seminar/lm series, to name just a few.

Similarly, categories and terminologies for descriptive purposes generally havenot yet fully developed to account for the slippery borders where the individu-

al works of art end and their installation and display begins, to discuss place-

ment of the single object and its function within a sequence, the relationships

and juxtapositions between objects, and what these arrangements mean for

the art and for the exhibition. And of course more generally, as we track the

evolution of the exhibition as a genre and independent eld of study, what

are the categories we apply to dene innovation, experimentation, success,

or failure? How do we compare different modalities of display, curatorial se-

lections, the changing interactions between curators and artists, expectations

for and from the viewers? How do we account for the relation between the

installation and the publication? These and many other questions that touch

on methodology and terminology on the one hand, as well as a general sense

of historical classication and canonization on the other, are still unanswered,

and thus suggest that even speaking of a “current fascination with the history

of exhibitions” needs to be considered in a new light.

Why should such a canon matter? Isn’t it, rather, that the discursive eld

of curatorial practice and exhibition studies has offered the perfect subject for



38

The Exhibitionist

an approach to cultural production that recognizes radical dispersal and dis-

continuity, the necessity for local context and preliminary truths, and the pos-

sibility of formal and methodological repetition and appropriation that are

not perceived as epigonic? Current curatorial analysis allows the discussion

of individual exhibitions and curatorial projects simply on their own terms,

without the need to situate them within a larger trajectory of historical development, and thus could ascribe meaning, value, and intellectual power to

them without recourse to comparison. In other words, would a return to the

narrative of inclusion and exclusion and originality and imitation—that the

establishment of a historical canon threatens to reintroduce—limit our ability

to assess the richness, diversity, and radical discontinuity of current produc-

tion through a reductive comparison with past achievements? Or wouldn’t

it, rather, afford us a toolkit and set of references that enable us to see the

current work of curators and artists in different, more complex terms? And

wouldn’t such a project in turn allow the present work to inform and expand

the past? In the last 15 or 20 years, curatorial practice has tested a range of

radical experiments, often without the intellectual support that a knowledge

of its historical predecessors might have provided. To create such a history

shouldn’t just be a fascination; it should be a necessity.

Back in 2001, my proposal for a dissertation about typologies of group

exhibitions after 1945, then still mainly conned to Western Europe and

North America, was guided by the idea that during the rst decade after

World War II, a paradigmatic shift in exhibition practice occurred. This shift

distinguished these exhibitions in crucial ways from exhibitions organized,

most often by artists, in the prewar period of the avant-gardes of “classicalmodernism” (a subject Bruce Altshuler has covered extensively in his book

The Avant-Garde in Exhibition ). While prewar exhibitions might be considered

“manifesto exhibitions” conceived by artists and artists’ groups to announce

a new style, to declare their arrival on the avant-garde stage, and to discredit

what came before them, exhibitions after 1945, and especially after 1955,

often emerged from a point of observation that was more editorial than

enunciatory.

Exhibitions that should and could be read as a book, drawing from forms

such as the essay to make their point, have developed since Documenta in

1955 and This Is Tomorrow in 1956 declared (both in unique ways) the arrival

of an organizing intermediary, who, on behalf of and in collaboration with

the artists, presented, arranged, commented upon, and shaped the material on

view. Several important paradigm shifts occurred in rapid succession through

the following decades, which can be traced through analyses of iconic exhibi-

tions such as When Attitudes Become Form and Op Losse Schroeven, Seth Siegelaub’s

publication-exhibitions in the late 1960s, and more recently the turn toward

community- and activism-driven exhibitions such as the aforementioned



39

Response II

Culture in Action in Chicago; the 1993 Whitney Biennial in New York; Projet

Unite in Firminy, France; and Sonsbeek 93 in Arnhem, the Netherlands; all

happening in 1993.

In 2001, this still sat uneasily with the academic art history establishment

that (at least at Freie Universität Berlin) had trepidations about the possibili-

ties of writing the art history of the last 40 years, and that (at Columbia Uni- versity) had no clear use for the study of exhibitions. I am not certain that the

academic climate has shifted much, but I feel the need for such a project just

as urgently today as a decade ago. No attempt at an overview of the develop-

ment of exhibitions—individual, group, thematic, or otherwise—has been

undertaken, no canon has been dened. Needless to say, the moment such a

list of important, even fundamental, exhibitions has been established, it will

be modied, added to, and disputed. But that is exactly what needs to hap-

pen. And, I believe, in order for it to happen we need to dene why and how

a certain exhibition matters, how it contributed to the formulation of new

paradigms, how it developed this or that topic further and proposed a more

resolved form, and how it challenged a model that had become outdated and

required correction.

Maybe such a project is no longer compatible with our times and with

discursive standards that recoil at the prospect of overarching narratives, gen-

eral statements, and even the idea of a canon. But the recourse to individual

exhibitions, to the case study and the monograph, and the insistence on the

singularity of a chosen example, isn’t forthcoming either. I believe that it is

exactly in the insistence on the concrete example, in the understanding of

the case study as a valid, even necessary, form of inquiry, that larger contoursof historical developments will reveal themselves. The Afterall book series

Exhibition Histories may be a rst place where this need is acknowledged, but I

hope that more and other voices will join in the discussion to properly create

a fascination for, and more fascinating accounts of, histories of exhibitions.



40

The Exhibitionist



41

The Exhibitionist

RESPONSE III

CURATORIAL

EDUCATION

Johanna Burton

Andrew Renton

Kate Fowle



42

Issue no. 130 (fall 2009) of October magazine was devoted to the “the con-

temporary,” a subject undertaken by some 32 writers with various perspec-

tives and vocations as responses to a questionnaire issued by the editors. The

respondents were for the most part a slew of self-identied art historians and

critics—though they were both emerging and established, and quite disparate

in terms of proximity to what might be considered recent art or cultural pro-

duction.1 While the resulting tapestry of (sometimes competing or conicting,

but just as often compatible) views yields an interesting case study in and of

itself, I call attention to the document here not to parse what it offered with

regard to the topic of the contemporary as a potential historical paradigm but

to focus on something quite particular that was missing. As Hal Foster pointed

out in a footnote accompanying the introduction to the package, “This ques-

tionnaire was sent to approximately seventy critics and curators, based in theUnited States and Europe, who are identied with this eld. Two notes: the

questions, as formulated, were felt to be specic to those regions; and very few

curators responded.”2

Flipping through the entries, the latter observation becomes starkly

evident: Out-and-out curators are nameable on (half of) one hand: Okwui

Enwezor, Kelly Baum, and Helen Molesworth. Here are the only gures

whose primary occupations—however differently performed or understood

even among these three—can be seen as more or less clearly aligned with the

day-to-day pursuit of certain aspects of the curatorial function. (There are a

number of others, including Richard Meyer, Mark Godfrey, and myself, who

weigh in—via pedagogy or practice—with inquiries related to and invested in

curating, but who can be argued to remain aligned for the most part with art

history and/or criticism.) Why were so few clear curatorial voices raised, and

why did so many seemingly opt out of (or not feel truly implicated within) the

conversation?

There are easy answers: Perhaps October isn’t the venue of choice for

gures contemplating the unwieldy, even maverick terrain of a still-emerging

discipline. Indeed, some would nd the context hostile for such discussions,

ON KNOT CURATING

Johanna Burton

1. By this I mean that some

figures are seen as more solidly

within the academic field of art

history even while attending as

well to current practices, whereas

others might arguably be seen to

take the contemporary as their

primary object, even while mak-

ing recourse to various histories.

A sampling of the respondents

attests to this kind of span and in-

cludes Julia Bryan-Wilson, Miwon

Kwon, Anton Vidokle, Terry Smith,

Tim Griffin, and Isabelle Graw.

See “A Questionnaire on ‘The

Contemporary’: 32 Responses,”

October no. 130 (fall 2009).

2. Ibid., 3.



An Illustrated Bibliography of The Exhibitionist, Issues I–IV

Jeffrey Abt, A Museum on the Verge:

A Socioeconomic History of the Detroit

Institute of the Arts 1882–2000

(Detroit: Wayne State University

Press, 2001)

Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in

Exhibition (New York: Abrams, 1994)

Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial,

Exhibitions That Made Art History,

Volume 1: 1863–1959 (London:

Phaidon, 2008)

Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob,

Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (Berkeley:

UC Press, 2004)

Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob,

Learning Mind: Experience Into Art (Chicago:

School of the Art Institute of Chicago,

2009)

Alain Badiou, Of an Obscure Disaster, eds.

Ozren Pupovac and Ivana Momcilovic

(Maastricht, the Netherlands, and

Zagreb, Croatia: Jan van Eyck Academie

and Arkzin d.o.o., 2009)

Zygmunt Bauman, The Art of Life

(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008)

Evelyn Beer and Riet de Leeuw, eds.,

L’Exposition Imaginaire: The Art of Exhibit -

ing in the Eighties (‘s-Gravenhage, SDU

uitgeverij, ‘s-Gravenhage: Rijksdienst

Beeldende Kunst, 1989)

Wim A. L. Beeren, Piero Gilardi, andHarald Szeemann, Op Losse Schroeven:

Situaties en Cryptostructuren (Amsterdam:

Stedelijk Museum, 1969)

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin

McLaughlin (Cambridge and London:

Belknap Press of Harvard University

Press, 1999)

Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso,

1998)

Tobia Bezzola and Roman Kurzmeyer,eds., Harald Szeemann: with by th rough because

towards despite: Catalogue of All Exhibitions

1957–2005 (Zürich, Vienna, and New

York: Edition Voldemeer and Springer,

2007)



Henry Bial and Carol Martin,

eds., Brecht Sourcebook (New York:

Routledge, 2000)

Emilie Bickerton, A Short History of

Cahiers du cinéma (London and New

York: Verso, 2009)

Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D.

Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Rosalind

Krauss, Art Since 1900: Modernism,

Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York:

Thames & Hudson, 2004)

Francesco Bonami and Maria Luisa Frisa,

eds., Dreams and Conicts: The Dictatorship

of the Viewer: 50th International Art Exhibition

(New York: Rizzoli, 2003)

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theater:

The Development of an Aesthetic, trans.

John Willett (New York: Hill and

Wang, 1992)

Jacques Brosse, Mythologie des arbres

(Paris: Payot-Rivages, 1993)

Daniel Buren, Achtung! Texte 1967–1991

(Dresden, Germany, and Basel, Swit-

zerland: Verlag der Kunst, 1995)

T. J. Clark, Image of the People:

Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution

(London: Thames and Hudson,

1973)

Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995)

Catherine David and Jean-FrancoisChevrier, eds., Politics Poetics:

Documenta X—The Book (Ostldern-

Ruit, Germany: Documenta and

Cantz, 1997)

Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998)

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia (London: Continuum

International Publishing Group,

2004)

The Exhibitionist



Florence Derieux, ed., Harald

Szeemann: Individual Methodology

(Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2007)

Diedrich Diederichsen, On (Surplus)

Value in Art: Reections 01 (Rotterdam

and Berlin: Witte de With and

Sternberg Press, 2008)

Umberto Eco, The Limits of

Interpretation (Bloomington, Indiana:

Indiana University Press, 1990)

Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality

(San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

1986)

Jonas Ekeberg, ed., New Institutional-

ism (Oslo: OCA/verksted, 2003)

Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal,

and Solveig Øvstebo, eds., The

Biennial Reader (Ostldern, Germany:

Hatje Cantz, 2010)

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Afuent

Society (London: Pelican, 1963)

Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds

of Interpretation (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1997)

Massimiliano Gioni, 10000 Lives:Gwangju Biennale 2010 (Gwangju,

South Korea: Gwangju Biennale

Foundation, 2010)

E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art(New York: Phaidon, 1951)

Claudia Gould and Valerie Smith,eds., 5000 Artists Return to Artists

Space: 25 Years (New York: Artists

Space, 1998)

Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W.Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, eds.,

Thinking About Exhibitions (London:

Routledge, 1996)




The Exhibitionist

Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge:

MIT Press, 2008)

Jan Hoet, Chambres d’Amis (Ghent,

Belgium: Museum Van Hedendaagse

Kunst, 1986)

Josué V. Harari, Textual St rategies:

Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism

(Ithaca, New York: Cornell University

Press, 1979)

Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, From the Classicists

to the Impressionists: Art and Architecture in the

19th Century (New Haven, Connecticut:

Yale University Press, 1986)

Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds.,

Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology

of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell

Publishing, 1992)

Pontus Hultén, The Machine as Seen at

the End of the Mechanical Age (New York:

Museum of Modern Art, 1968)

Jim Hillier, ed., Cahiers du cinéma: The

1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1985)

Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing

(New York: Twelve, 2010)

Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson,eds., The Meaning of Photography

(Williamstown, Massachusetts:

Sterling and Francine Clark Art

Institute, 2008)

John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton

& Co., 1963)

Ljiljana Kolešnik, ed., Croatian ArtCriticism of the 1950s: Selected Essays

(Zagreb, Croatia: Croatian Art

Historians’ Association, 2000)

Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another:Site-Specic Art and Locational Identity

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002)



Sven Lütticken, Secret Publicity: Essays

on Contemporary Art (Rotterdam and

Amsterdam: Nai Publishers and

Fonds BKVB, 2005)

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern

Condition: A Report on Knowledge

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1984)

Paula Marincola, ed., What Makes

a Great Exhibition? (Philadelphia:

Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative,

Philadelphia Center for Arts and

Heritage, 2006)

Davor Matic̆evic ,́ Innovations in Croatian

Art in the 1970s (Zagreb, Croatia: GSU,

1982)

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Random House Digital

Inc., 2006)

James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven,

Connecticut: Yale University Press,

2001)

William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (Cambridge: MIT

Press, 1997)

Véronique Mortaigne, Johnny Hallyday: Le Roi Cache (Paris: Don

Quichotte, 2009)

Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain:

New Genre Public Art (San Francisco:

Bay Press, 1995)

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Necklines: The

Art of Jacques-Louis David After the

Terror (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1999)

Maria Lind, Selected Maria Lind

Writing, ed. Brian Kuan Wood

(Berlin and New York: Sternberg

Press, 2010)

Lucy Lippard, ed. Six Years: The

Dematerialization of the Art Object from

1966 to 1972 . . . (Berkeley: UC

Press, 1997)




Paul O’Neill, ed., Curating Subjects

(London: Open Editions /

Occasional Table, 2007)

Peter Pakesch, ed., John Baldessari: Life’s

Balance, Works 1984–2004 (Cologne:

Walther Konig, 2005)

Christian Rattemeyer et al., Exhibiting

the New Art: Op Losse Schroeven and When

Attitudes Become Form, 1969 (London:

Afterall Books in association with the

Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Van

Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2010)

Brenda Richardson and Susan Rannells,

eds., Free (Berkeley: UC Berkeley Art

Museum, 1970)

Juan José Saer, Glosa (Barcelona:Seix Barral, 2003)

Sohnya Sayres, ed., et al., The 60sWithout Apology (Minneapolis: Univer-

sity of Minnesota Press, 1984)

F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art,trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1989)

Gerhard Schulze, Die Erlebnisge-sellschaft (Frankfurt and New York:

Campus, 1992)

Gerardo Mosquera, Beyond the

Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from

Latin America (London: Institute of

International Visual Arts, 1996)

Julian Myers and Joanna Szupinska,

eds., We Have as Much Time as It Takes

(San Francisco: CCA Wattis Institute

for Contemporary Arts, 2010)

Hans Ulrich Obrist, A Brief History of

Curating (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2008)

Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White

Cube: The Ideology of t he Gallery Space

(London: Lapis Press, 1986)

The Exhibitionist



John Simpson and Edmund Weiner,

eds., The Oxford English Dictionary

(New York and Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2009)

Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2009)

Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson:

The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: UC Press,

1996)

Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of

Display: A History of Exhibition Installations

at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge:

MIT Press, 2001)

Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria:Confrontations with Twentieth-Century

Art (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2007)

Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Theoriesand Documents of Contemporary Art: A

Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley:

UC Press, 1996)

Pekka Sulkunen, John Holmwood,Hilary Radner, and Gerhard Schulze,

eds., Constructing the New Consumer Society

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997)

Harald Szeemann, ed., Documenta 5(Kassel, Germany: Documenta and

Bertelsmann, 1972)

Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice

(New York: Harper Collins, 2004)

Kitty Scott, ed., Raising Frankenstein:

Curatorial Education and Its Discontents

(Cologne: Koenig Books, 2011)

W. G. Sebald, After Nature (New York:

Random House Digital Inc., 2003)

Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public

Man (New York: W. W. Norton &

Company, 1992)




Susan Vogel, ART/Artifact: African Art

in Anthropology Collections (New York

and Munich: Center for African Art

and Prestel Verlag, 1988)

Dorothea von Hantelmann, How to Do

Things with Art (Zurich: JRP/Ringier,

2010)

Richard Wagner, Richard Wagner’s

Prose Works, Volume 1: The Art-Work of

the Future, trans. William Ashton Ellis

(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Kübner

& Co. Ltd., 1895)

Samuel J. Wagstaff, ed., Other Ideas

(Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1969)

Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York:

New Museum of Contemporary

Art; Boston: David R. Godine,

1984)

Brian Wallis, ed., If You Lived Here:The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activ -

ism: A Project by Martha Rosler (Seattle:

The New Press, 1998).

What, How, and for Whom /WHW, What Keeps Mankind Alive?

11th International Istanbul Biennial

(Istanbul: Istanbul Kültür Sanat, 2009)

Stephen Wright, Going Native (NewYork: Dell Publishing, 1994)

Harald Szeemann, Live In Your Head:

When Attitudes Become Form: Works,

Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information

(London: Institute of Contemporary

Arts, 1969)

Harald Szeemann, Museum der

Obsessionen (Berlin: Merve, 1981)

Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena

Filipovic, eds., The Manifesta Decade:

Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials


Paul Virilio, Landscape of Events


The Exhibitionist



51

Response III

a point that became clear in the defensive crouch of some of the respon-

dents weighing in, as they labored to shield contemporary practices against

perceived ahistoricism, spectacle, or viral cultural spread. To boot, the pool

canvased, though somewhat diverse, was ultimately a fairly tried-and-true

bunch, and so didn’t represent much in the way of gures engaged in overtly

experimental discursive strategies. Thus, the resulting texts were coded moreby way of competency than true insecurity, and even if the idea of the con-

temporary did seem, for some, to mark a kind of “turn,” this for the most

part enumerated little more than a 360-degree pivot. One could argue the

obvious (and, to my mind, reactionary) point that October is simply too overtly

positioned, and too overtly partisan, to be identied with by a new breed of

curators who have found or created (or are nding and creating) other ven-

ues for their discussions. Indeed, the publication in which you read this essay

stands as one instance of a context recently honed in order to ll just the kind

of gaps that are thought to exist with regard to conversations around curating

(with its theoretical and practical concerns per se) as a foremost topic, rather

than as an offshoot, effect, addendum, or parasite, on art history or anything

else. Finally, and compellingly, one might say that the very notion of plumb-

ing ideas (and histories) of the contemporary would be antithetical (and even

inconceivable) for a certain stripe of curator today, who would regard the

exercise as hyperbolic, and truly and utterly redundant.

As true as any of the above explanations might be, more forceful as an

answer to why October no. 130 was nearly void of curatorial reection is the

possibility that considerations of curating—its practices, histories, procedures,

and politics—are in the process of becoming fully loosened from consider-ations of art in any previously coherent or stable sense. I say this advisedly,

and polemically, fully aware that the argument will seem wholly problematic

and even patently untrue. How can curating be considered at all outside the

very sphere in which it organizes itself and participates (even when proposing

alternative structures)? What would it, or could it, mean to claim that curating

is, perhaps, rapidly nding itself unmoored from the very objects and con-

texts that it would ostensibly attend to? In other words, did curators choose

not to respond to the October questionnaire, with its prompts to consider how

we think about current conditions for art, its organization, and its audiences,

because they are involved in pursuing other questions?

I put forward this speculative claim—that some advanced conversations

around curating are migrating away from the more functionally integrated (or

at least recognizably demarcated) eld we might call art—due to a shift I am

experiencing within my own context. I currently direct the graduate program

at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. Now approaching its 20-

year anniversary, it was rst formed in response to a growing sense that curat-

ing needed to be regarded as embodying more than the caretaking operation

implied by its etymology. Indeed, given that institutional critique has revealed



52

The Exhibitionist

the structural imperatives and ideologies of culture, and artistic practice has

demanded reevaluation of both production and reception, it makes sense that

the early 1990s saw curatorial practice taken up as an object in its own right.

The conversations that have evolved in that arena over the last two de -

cades have been both exhilarating and frustrating. Tangles over just what is to

be taught in a two-year master’s degree course in curating have not abated.Some argue that curatorial programs, like master’s programs in art practice,

offer more in the way of strategic networking than foundation, and empha-

size the meet-and-greet aspect of curating as a social occupation. Others feel

a patently academic approach is in order, to ensure that young curators in

the eld will have some sense of history and develop stakes within the eld,

emphasizing the role exhibitions and curators have played in, among other

things, art history and its evolutions. Adversaries on this count would argue

for a curatorial version of technical schools, whereby the various pragmatic

tools of conservation, installation, and inter-institutional communication are

handed down unfettered to ensure that students entering the workforce do so

with a clear and unadulterated skill set. Finally, curating seen in an expanded

eld—as an activity that not only operates within and by way of institutions

of art but extends these as well—has allowed for theoretical and politically

driven conversations that take into account globalization, neoliberalism, and

cosmopolitanism. CCS cannot be reduced to having followed any one of

these strands singularly, as its reins have been held by various directors and its

courses led by a panoply of instructors with different aims. Yet it has veered

strongly away from both the technical school model and, as much as possible,

the nishing school approach, where placement is the ultimate goal. If theplace has had stronger leanings, these have undebatably been art historical

and broadly theoretical—often warring impulses despite what would seem to

be compatible directions and, in fact, necessary foils.

What I mean by this is simply that, in my time at CCS (some ve years

total, though I am now completing both my rst as director and rst in a full-

time capacity), the divide between what has come to be seen as curating that

nds its footing in art history versus that which anchors to the vicissitudes of

larger culture has increasingly yawned. To my mind it’s a false divide, par-

ticularly since the version of art history I advocate is in and of itself indivis-

ible from the analysis and contemplation of society, particularly in terms of

its organization by way of class, gender, sexuality, and race. Yet, art history

(and curating’s place in it) is also regarded as a kind of institution, one whose

parameters need to be acknowledged but outpaced, and many of my own

students—without discounting the importance of what’s come before—feel

at an articulable distance from that discipline. They are much more urgently

engaged in placing their own practices more visibly within discussions that

move in seemingly other directions, these more directly tethered to consid-

erations of images, say, as they are collected, distributed, and rerouted more



54

The Exhibitionist

ditional” or give themselves over to contributing to narratives (even if radical

retellings) of history. To this end, it becomes somewhat clear why so many

voices were absent in the questionnaire with which I began. If the curatorial

takes as part of its mission the circumnavigating or disruption of institutions

mired in ideology, contributing to these institutions would be counterintuitive.

Yet, as Helen Molesworth points out in her contribution to the October issue,institutions themselves need to be rethought, and their potential for introduc-

ing alternative or opposition models reinvested in. That, as she says, it’s hard

to think of a single New York museum today that has either a position or an

effect on culture (beyond that of magnifying via reection) does not mean this

has always been the case. Indeed, not so many decades ago, some institutions

were formed in order to act precisely as antiestablishment rmaments, and we

need not let go of that potential now.

I am not arguing for institutions as the new seat of radicalism or, even,

as sites appropriate for a number of ventures we might deem curatorial. Yet

to imagine institutions as monolithic—or to position them as fossils to be

referred to rather than engaged—is also an oversight, and mere parodies or

gestures of critique are a real risk in this construction. (Here one wishes to

pause briey and also underscore the ways in which the institution of art

can be extended from architecture and organizations to the discourses and

dialogues that make art legible as such, ever expanding or altering its deni-

tion; one is necessarily entwined in the other.)4 I would go so far as to say we

are already experiencing a new formalism of critique whereby certain artistic

and curatorial practices are valued precisely for their polite enumerations of

awareness, their performances of consciousness. Indeed, as we have seen inthe past, almost all practices that garner any traction, no matter how far they

position themselves outside of the grasp of various structures, end up con-

tributing to those very structures, for better or for worse. It seems to me that

the promise of curatorial education at the moment is to consider the internal

tensions it generates and to resist overgeneralizing where the border between

“inside” and “outside” might be. It’s possible, I think, to both recognize the

limitations of something and invest in new forms that pirate from its seem-

ing exhaustion. Starting in the mid-1980s, the artist Sherrie Levine, told that

painting had nally met its match (again), began making her Knot Paintings,

which, by protesting too much, got to have things both ways. (Spoken aloud,

the series title seems to disavow the medium, even while the works are pre-

cisely what is described—painted knots in wooden panels—bringing about a

conundrum forcing us to look at artistic conventions anew.) I propose, then,

that we sometimes aim to “knot curate,” acknowledging the impossible tan-

gles of the curatorial with regard to the institutions of the past and those of

the future (including the curatorial itself) while proposing new models, even if

they sometimes look anything but.

4. As Andrea Fraser recently

wrote “The institution is us,” in

her essay “From the Critique of

Institutions to an Institution of

Critique,” Artforum (September

2005): 278–83.



55

Response III

I’ve been worrying that we talk about curating too much. We never used to

talk about curating like this. We just got on with it. Actually, we hardly even

had a name for it. But as it takes shape as an academic subject, the level

of self-consciousness that this produces provokes a form of rhetorical, even

ironic, curating. It’s our fault. At best we are at a moment that coins the

new languages of curating. At worst the academy becomes home to curating

about curating. Curating as subject, but with no subject to curate. Surely the

practice of curating offers more possibilities than that. Curating as research.

Curating in the lab.

But it’s still early days for curating. And even more so for curating as an

academic subject. The growth of curating programs around the world seems

to reect demand from potential students, if not necessarily from the institu-

tions that might later employ them. According to this trajectory, one night -mare scenario is that there might soon be as many curators as artists—a sort

of concierge service for art, every artist having their own curator in tow. And

then there are the specializations, where curating is invoked to serve every

type of micro-medium.

What accounts for this interest? There’s a cynical suggestion that it’s a

desire to participate in the art world. It does sound glamorous, but there are

easier ways to crash the parties. I want to argue for something else: that there

is an emerging discipline of curating that relocates its legacies, as it gradu-

ally frees itself from the constraints of the institution and comes to occupy a

unique place in the academy. It needs to be sited there if only to dene very

often what it is not. The discourse of curating is not about methodologies of

display or histories of the museum, but about an expanded eld of practice. I

want to argue against the trend for curatorial specializations in favor of curat-

ing as a more inclusive mediating practice.

There is a paradox to this, given that curating, I would argue, must

be understood in terms of practice rather than as a supplementary activity

FORM S OF PRACTI CE:

CURATIN G IN THE ACADEMY

Andrew Renton



56

The Exhibitionist

tacked onto the end of art history. It is not art history, nor is it museology.

Rather, it functions in a variety of ways to produce a language of its own that

goes beyond another styling of critical theory. It is responsive, of course, in its

relationship to art and to artists, but it may also be proactive in the ways in

which it seeks to establish spaces and contexts of operation for works and

people. The adherence to practice is an ideological position. Immediately this

ags up the difculties of teaching curating as a subject. It’s not a subject at all,

but rather a framework or critical mechanism to enable self-criticality, and to

expand a eld of vision. It’s tempting even to propose curating as a genre. Cu-

rating not so much as critique or commentary, but as a formal manifestation

of practice. Genre, here, is a denable space or language within or against

which one might work continuously. To propose curating as a genre would

suggest that it is a practice that is not exclusively responsive or secondary to

the styles of art with which it collaborates.

Curating as a taught subject is not even 20 years old. The program I

inherited eight years ago at Goldsmiths, for example, had been run along a

social science model, for no apparent reason, as far as I could determine,

other than to apply some formal rigor to this relatively new discipline. All the

more strange, as it was positioned in the ne art department rather than under

the umbrella of art history. The art school has been comfortably embedded

in the British University since the 1950s, with all the implications that come

with the notion of supporting artistic practice as an academic, assessable

subject.

Analyzing the specications of the curatorial program we inherited atGoldsmiths, my colleagues and I understood that it had been framed within

the university institution to invoke systems of knowledge that were subject-

specic. It’s hard to excavate what exactly the motivations for this were, but

they were perhaps related to an inherent institutional nervousness at the pros-

pect of this new discipline.

Curating programs framed themselves in the early days through a tri-

partite model of artist-curator-audience. But much of what was taught re-

lied heavily upon museological technicalities, social engagement, and a small

measure of connoisseurship thrown in. A training in a portfolio of predeter-

mined skills, rather than in a more complex development of an individuated

practice. No negotiation of position, of where the curator might be in spaces

in which art circulates and comes to be seen.

It seems to me that the moment for curating programs has really oc-

curred in the last decade, exactly when permission for curating as a prac-

tice has become fully part of the discourse of the broader art world. And

the moment when curating came into its own, no longer obliged to defend



57

Response III

itself as a role, is the same moment that we understood that curating cannot

be taught.

This is not as radical as it sounds. And it is certainly not bad news. It

means that the moment you recognize curating as a practice, another type of

contextualization comes to take the place of the canon, opening it up beyond

one singular history or methodology. And because of the openness of thepractice it is not a question of curriculum.

There’s a blank space to be lled, and indeed a space to be forced open,

where the curator is accountable to a multitude of inuences. In this way

curating cannot be taught, because it should anticipate being out of its depth.

Curating doesn’t tick boxes, but ows over the margins. Practice is an un-

steady condition that thrives on the spaces its experimentation opens up. Cer-

tainly there is an articulacy that can be developed around practice. Context,

if you will. But it is not prescriptive. If context is almost the sum of what one

might be able to teach, by the same token, curating as a taught subject should

recognize that it cannot hope to cover all the ground. It must be subject to

constant change and displacement. (And never rely upon the same reading

list from one year to the next.)

There’s a function for the curator that needs to be dened beyond foot-

noting what has gone before. The model that emerges must be one of sub-

jectivity, where the curator produces an alternative set of histories that work

backward to locate themselves.

By the same token, with hindsight, as we attempted to rethink how curat-

ing might be taught, we might well have thrown the baby out with the bath-

water. In our revisions, we chose not to prioritize technical skill sets in favor oflearning those practicalities on the job. We do not teach a history of display

from the Wunderkammer to When Attitudes . . . for fear of an overindebtedness to

art history. Instead we conduct seminars according to the practices of the stu-

dents. We shouldn’t do more than structure the space in which their projects

are tested among their peers. No thematics, except perhaps the understated

anticipation of barely visible memes, or an unstable zeitgeist. No theory as a

starting point, except in the service of a project under discussion.

And yet, almost reluctantly, we found ourselves reintroducing histories

into the discourse. But this time the perspective was different. For example,

at Goldsmiths we have developed a curatorial histories course inside the pro -

gram that is entirely driven by the students. They select the exhibitions that

are to be brought to the seminar for discussion. They rewrite the history of

these precedents. What we continue to learn from this is just how curating is

used for dramatically different agendas, and continues to be read differently,

depending on one’s perspective. This sound like a banal truism, given the un -

contested internationalism of contemporary art, when there is no continent



58

The Exhibitionist

or region without its own biennial or art fair. Because we are all subscribed

to e-ux, the new curating reveals not so much a distinction of content, but a

dramatic difference of purpose. We never anticipated that our students would

wish to use curating as a language that changes so dramatically depending on

the context.

If the ethics of curating are to be based on the obligations that emergewith practice, then how is it possible to negotiate the curated object if, by de-

nition, it is absent from the site of the discourse? Art schools have long taught

around a produced object, in the studio, where, for the most part, the object

is fabricated. The critique takes place with a materialized work, or at least

the work in progress. There’s something to see, to walk around. But that’s not

always a possibility within the practice of curating. The acts of curating are

so often deferred. The processes of production may be drawn out, and might

occur much later in the day, or, of course, elsewhere.

But there must be a way to carry forward the encounter of the studio

critique into the obligations of curating. It’s an intense encounter, and always

an ethical one. Facing up to the work of art and nding a language for it. I

would wish to argue that there is a possibility of a curatorial critique that

retains this ethical obligation, even with the physical absence of the works of

art under discussion. Practice, or research, occurs elsewhere. In this way the

academy is not necessarily the site of that research, but a location that gathers

these ndings into an open discourse.

In the name of curating, even the objects sometimes get in the way. We

became commitment-phobic in this ight from the museum, adeptly avoiding

any obligation at all to the materiality of the collection. Indeed, the triumphfor the independent curator was the ability to be detached from an obligation

to a collection as such.

The curator was no longer at home. Uprooted, the curator could operate

in a variety of registers and locations in a practice of curatorial temporality,

rather than any consolidation of history. And this was a battle worth ghting.

It signals the moment when curating begins. But we lost the touch; we hardly

handled anything. And sometimes you do need a home to go home to.

Returning to the collection, we’ve renegotiated it through a couple of

surprising, unanticipated routes. If today’s generation of curators inherits a

legacy of dematerialized, process- and discourse-driven curating, the physi-

cal absence that is produced in the wake of such strategies becomes a site of

mourning and loss. Something was left behind.

At the same time, the past decade has seen the growth of independent

collections, far beyond the control and rigor of any museum. Independent,

willful, without constraint, these collections reect an increased interest

in and hunger for contemporary art as economic and intellectual capital.



59

Response III

Highly visualized outputs, generating speed through consumption. And no

one has begun to think their way through them in any critical way, except

as symptoms of a market. But their curatorial legacy will prove much more

interesting.

The object returns, however subversive the form. Indeed, the more sub-

versive the better. The contemporary collection has become innitely accom-modating; there is nothing it could not bring under its auspices. It moves

quickly, rashly, and does not fret with buyer’s remorse. But it can only do this

without overindebtedness to a past. What is collected is a manifestation of

existential desire. It does not have to tell the whole story. It simply tells its own,

here, now. Outside of history.

In such a climate the contemporary curator has to negotiate this surplus

and is obliged to reengage with the idea of collection building. These collec-

tions become the sites where new conjunctions might be formed, temporarily,

that collapse museums’ histories in favor of an ethics of subjectivity. The col-

lection must be irresponsible, must refuse to retread the territory of the mu-

seum, and the curator now faces a unique opportunity to engage with this.

Another side of this practice of curating would be to propose the notion

of the non-curator, perhaps in a way similar to how Brian Eno used to speak

of himself as a non-musician. But if curating resists becoming a subject, then

why try to test its limits in academia? My sense is that we have learned a

great deal through the curating programs about where curating might oper-

ate. Curating beyond the exhibition, a new generation of curators want to

curate wherever gaps occur in their world experience. A sort of daily practice

of curating. If the academic context runs the risk of producing a potentiallyunhealthy degree of self-consciousness in curatorial practice, so too it needs

a degree of self-awareness to seek out corners of interpretation that critical

discourse alone cannot reach.

A non-curating, or minor curating, then, that resists the monumental in

favor of a temporary critique. Curating as problem solving, sketching out the

territory.

Often invisible, its effect is incremental and highly localized. It is not re-

stricted to proposing specialist expertise, but rather offers a tailored response

to where you nd yourself, here, now. While fully conversant with the lan-

guage of the biennial or the museum or the catalogue raisonné, this is a curat-

ing of temporality, always in motion, barely observable, but embedded within

the practices of art making. Again, an ethics of curating.

A longtime collaborator of Harald Szeemann once told me that

Szeemann never included a work in an exhibition that he had not traveled

to see in the esh. The curator today might express disappointment if some-

thing did not yield immediate results in a Google image search. There’s some



60

The Exhibitionist

legitimacy to the young curators’ strategy, as much as we very much frown

upon it in class. After all, Aby Warburg’s dislocation of art history brilliantly

anticipated the equivalence and simultaneity of the Google search. But I sus-

pect that Szeemann, if he was alive today, would still prefer to conduct his

research the long way round.



61

Response III

In early 2011 the Banff Centre in Canada published a book called Raising

Frankenstein: Curatorial Education and Its Discontents, which includes essays on cu-

rating programs and their outcomes—ranging from the provocative to the

testimonial—by a diversity of practitioners at different stages of their careers

who participated in a conference on the same subject at the Banff Interna-

tional Curatorial Institute in November 2008. Ever since curating programs

were rst established, they have caused consternation and divided opinions as

to their effectiveness and purpose. Regardless, the programs have proliferat-

ed, largely as a result of their popularity among the ever-increasing numbers

of people who see further education as a fast track to a curatorial footing. For

better or worse, it is evident that the formalized practice of teaching curating

is here to stay, and the debates of “to be or not to be” are now rhetorical. This

was made clear in the panel discussion published in Raising Frankenstein, whichapparently dissolved into a stalemate of personal opinion.

While exploring various curating programs’ pitfalls in her text for The Ex-

hibitionist no. 3, Maria Lind called such programs “one of the most signicant

additions in the past 20 years to the system of art.” This is certainly true if

one is to take into account their increasing centrality in conversations around

curating and developing institutions. Whether we agree with these programs

or not, the fact of their existence has helped to trigger reexive questioning

by directors, curators, artists, and a few other seasoned exhibition-goers on

what “Curating” is. It has also contributed heavily to the impetus for some

long-overdue publishing on exhibition histories, as well as—for want of a bet-

ter phrase—curator’s monographs. The latter address the oeuvres of specic

practitioners, such as Harald Szeemann: with by through because towards despite that

was published in 2007, or the recent book of Lind’s writing and exhibitions

published by Sternberg Press.

Up to now very little of this published scholarship has been produced as

a direct result of curatorial programs, which is surprising, as one would imag -

ine it to be a chicken-and-egg scenario, wherein for example the research gen-

erated via the classes would form the core of material for print. While all the

AN EDUCATION

Kate Fowle



62

The Exhibitionist

programs have paved the way for curators and directors to talk more about

their exhibitions, concepts, and research, and many of these presentations

have been recorded, the speed with which the courses move through various

visiting professionals and topics has led to a tendency toward archiving pri-

mary material rather than spending time developing it further.

Toward the end of her article, Lind observes two paths for programmaticreform that could inject more causality into the system: To study the “history

and practices of curating as a subcategory of (for example) art history, visual

culture studies, or ethnography,” which she suggests would impact the depth

of publishing; or alternatively to focus on “the curatorial” as a methodology,

wherein “most functions within an institution or other organization would be

the object of curatorial scrutiny and practical work,” which would shift the

emphasis from teaching curating as a series of temporary gestures or exhibi-

tions to thinking though longer-term infrastructures. Both approaches indi-

cate ways to hone the specicity of studies, which could collectively create a

more in-depth body of research that could be useful to others in the eld, as

well as productively enhance the various institutional frameworks—from uni-

versities and art schools to museums—that currently support them. Strategies

such as these are increasingly the direction in which progress for curatorial

programs is discussed, for the most part because the practical aspects of the

training are criticized as being dubiously productive. But it is Lind’s parting

proposition, which advocates for a hands-on approach to developing curato-

rial practices, that I think is key to advancing the actual profession (as opposed

to pedagogical strategies) today.

To paraphrase, she calls for encouraging young people to self-organizecurated projects and that this could be supplemented by short courses, so that

discussions around art and context could produce discourse and networks

between working peers. In short, Lind is calling for the growth of practical

solutions that respond to the needs of those who are learning through doing,

and which may not always be best served by the current academic systems of

master’s degrees or postgraduate programs.

In 2002 I cofounded the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at

California College of the Arts in San Francisco. It was the second such mas-

ter’s degree program to be launched in the United States and the rst in the

country to be established in an art school context. Using the word “practice”

to dene the program rather than “studies” could be seen as semantics, but

the latter implies a distance to the subject that is counterintuitive to the pro -

cess of curating, which has to involve parallel “doing” and “thinking” just

as an artist’s practice does. In the six years that I directed the program, it

became very clear to me that students with prior work experience in the eld

could contribute more to, and get more out of, the courses, but they got frus-

trated with the endurance of a two-year seminar-bound regime; testing out

ideas can only go so far when more emphasis is put on discussion than action.



63

Response III

But at the same time, the museum and gallery professionals who taught the

classes often commented on how much they valued the opportunity to reect

on their work in the midst of busy schedules. What became evident is that it is

productive for curators at every stage of their careers to take a step back and

go deeper into the whys and wherefores of practice. But the question is: for

how long and in what context? In places where there is less formal infrastructure, emergent systems have

evolved that give local arts professionals the opportunity for precisely this kind

of reection and examination. For example: Arts Initiative Tokyo (a-i-t) is an

organization started in 2001 that has successfully produced nonaccredited

courses (curatorial and otherwise) for 10 years. And in Mexico City a suc-

cessful nonaccredited curatorial program was formed by Teratoma—a group

of curators, artists, anthropologists, and art historians—that lasted for three

years, from 2003 to 2006. Both projects had inbuilt exibility so as to accom-

modate the changing interests of the participants as well as the opportuni-

ties afforded by visiting professionals to each city. Through this, experimental

forums were created to explore art-world and curatorial issues, develop new

discourses from a local perspective, and enable collaborations. Though they

were informal, both programs have had a proven impact via the creation

of small-scale institutions, exhibitions, and writing by people who have gone

through the courses, as well as new national and international platforms,

which continue to expand.

In 2009 I became the director of Independent Curators International

(ICI), a small nonprot organization based in New York that develops touring

exhibitions, publications, and public programs with international curators.Once there, I saw an opportunity to address curatorial training outside of the

formal education system, inspired by the success of the pragmatic approaches

to education mentioned above, but with an international perspective. The

result is the Curatorial Intensive, which is a low-cost, 10-day curatorial short

course. Held twice a year in New York, and in other locations worldwide (such

as Mumbai, Johannesburg, and Philadelphia) in conjunction with local insti-

tutional partners, the program is for practitioners who are already working. It

consists of seminars based on case studies led by curators, directors, art histo-

rians, critics, and artists; group-led discussions; site visits to museums, galleries,

private collections, and artists’ studios; and one-on-one sessions around proj-

ects that the participants are developing themselves. The Intensive culminates

in a daylong symposium wherein the participants present project proposals to

a public audience, and then the nalized proposals (which are worked on with

ICI for several months after the course) are posted on ICI’s website. The aim

is to give people working in diverse circumstances around the world—often

outside of established art centers, or in newly emerging ones as far aeld as

South Africa, Singapore, Egypt, Belgium, Colombia, Serbia, Ireland, Bul-

garia, Israel, Tasmania, and Nigeria—the chance to develop their ideas and



64

The Exhibitionist

make connections internationally.

The basic structure of the Curatorial Intensive remains the same with

each iteration, but the content, as well as the selection of participants, de-

pends on the specic issues that are recognized as pressing, or lacking in op-

portunities for professional development, for instance curating in the public

realm, or curating performance. The premise is the critique of practice ratherthan the teaching of theories and concepts, so that through the courses peo-

ple at different stages of their careers, with varying institutional experience

and geographical knowledge, can temporarily create a critical mass through

which to interact and bounce ideas off one another. As a result, some unlikely

intergenerational and interregional networks and collaborations are starting

to develop. Time will tell their ultimate value to discourse and practice around

the world.

There is no doubt that curating programs need to diversify and become

more specialized to stay relevant to the ever-expanding art system. There is

a clear need for the development of more research-based courses oriented

toward institutional analysis, as well as the production of scholarship around

exhibition histories, but we must also think of ways that curators can get

access to shared self-reection throughout their careers, not just at the be-

ginning. The issue is how to make time for this productively in an already-

demanding work schedule.

Lind writes of her concern that master’s degree programs function as

“part-incubators, part-greenhouses” that “not only pamper the students, but

also put tremendous efforts into sustaining those who otherwise wouldn’t

make it.” Furthermore, she posits that the greenhouse effect is one that,through producing growth at speed, creates a false faith in education and its

eventual outcomes. I think this is true in the context of academic environ-

ments that encourage growing for the sake of growing, but it’s also the very

premise on which “graduating” is based, and so is somewhat inevitable within

academia.

When imagining how to provide opportunities for growth over, say, a

40-year career, it is necessary to vary our received notions of ideal duration

and speed for education. In a constantly evolving professional context driven

by engagement with artists, shorter, more intensive learning environments

can create a much-needed rupture of the day-to-day. But this also needs to

happen more than once. Perhaps it is better to consider the model of retreats,

which are perceived to be a forum that is returned to with a kind of “slow”

regularity. These work on the premise of taking the current experience and

attitude of the participants as the common ground, rather than using a pre-

scribed starting point or generic level of knowledge and understanding from

which to generate development. Creating a dynamic and intelligent art world

across countries and generations will require everyone involved to pay more

attention to fostering opportunities for taking stock, converging, and learning

over time.



65

The Exhibitionist

RESPONSE IV

THE

PARACURATORIAL

Vanessa Joan Müller

Lívia Páldi

Emily Pethick



66

RELAYS


1. Gérard Genette, Paratexts:

Thresholds of Interpretation

(Cambridge: CUP, 1997).

When I was asked to write a text about the “paracuratorial,” a seminar de -

voted to lmic paratexts that I attended as part of my lm studies coursework

immediately sprang to mind. Based on Gérard Genette’s denition of the

paratext as the sum of those elements that accompany a text or a book—from

the dust jacket to the advertising campaign—the lmic paratext serves as a

framing adjunct with the power to guide our reading of a lm.1 The directors

of the Nouvelle Vague were characterized above all by their affording this

framework almost as much attention as they gave to the lms themselves. The

opening and closing credits, the poster, and also writing on the subject of lm

constitute the levels of commentary that coalesce to form the overall space

inhabited by a lm and render its external and internal references visible and

subject to analysis.

Along with its core duty of exhibition making, curating also encompassesa whole series of other activities that are now taken for granted: writing ac-

companying texts, programming lm series, organizing lectures and talks, et

cetera. As a (somewhat academic) term, the “paracuratorial” has arisen out

of a plane of commentary similar to other paratexts in order to channel the

reception of the exhibition in a particular direction and illuminate its inher-

ent systems of reference. In recent years, however, this whole area has devel-

oped its own impetus. We are no longer dealing only with elds that go hand-

in-hand with curatorial work and ultimately therefore the exhibition itself,

but also with arenas that have taken the place of the exhibition: the thematic

reader, the academic conference, the philosophical seminar. Curators stage

salons and interdisciplinary symposia, and even publish periodicals. They

adopt artistic methodologies of research-based activity and present their own

institutional history as an interactive archive. They adapt the notion of a col-

lective production of knowledge in the form of temporary academies. We are

dealing with an enormous degree of openness nowadays with regard to what

is offered by, and what can be discussed within, the context of an institution.

As a result, new conicts, correspondences, and commentaries have emerged

The Exhibitionist



67

Response IV

2. Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt,

“Harnessing the Means of

Production” in New Institutional-

ism, ed. Jonas Ekeberg (Oslo:

OCA/verksted, 2003): 78.

within the traditional coordinates of art that place the format of the exhibi-

tion in an altered, broader focus.

Many of these activities are the result of a series of considerations that

relate to how the art institution sees itself, and ultimately also relate to the

academic processing of such considerations. To a certain extent, they rep-

resent the legacy of New Institutionalism, which has itself become a kindof common property. In its wake, museums, galleries, and art centers have

transformed themselves into more open formats. They have tried to foster a

more democratic attitude toward their audiences, and to open themselves up

to new forms of artistic practice. The institution as “part-community center,

part-laboratory, and part-academy” may well belong to the past, but its di-

verse components are part and parcel of everyday curatorial practice.2 In the

eld of education in particular, diverse models have been developed to reach

out to new audiences and (to a certain extent) to make art more accessible

across the board. Moreover, there has been a recognition of the institution’s

potential to create a public for art and to act as a substitute for those spaces

that have become increasingly subservient to commercial interests and are no

longer inclusive, but exclusive.

This also implies that different institutional formats do indeed represent

“sealed, protected areas” (that would constitute the white cube’s productive

legacy) where things can happen that don’t happen elsewhere. The repoliti-

cization of art, the focus upon—often already historic—activist formats, and

the close collaboration with local communities make it apparent that diverse

forums that once existed have now ceased to exist in this particular way. A

broadened form of curatorial practice occasionally compensates for this, toan extent.

Classic institutional critique targeted the framework of art’s production

as well as the socioeconomic and political conditions of the institutions en-

gaged in its exhibition. It analyzed and questioned the very locus in which art

was publicly displayed. Precisely because institutional critique was ultimately

a form of criticism that afrmed its own institutional basis—as an “internal”

critique referring to the institutional status of art and the system of art institu-

tions (ranging from museums to galleries to art periodicals or indeed the art

market)—it was also possible for art institutions to utilize it for their own pur -

poses of self-legitimation. (As indeed it often was, through to the ubiquitous

rhetoric plied by curators today that art is permanently “crossing borders”

of one kind or another, questioning relationships of power, and unveiling

institutional mechanisms.) A follow-up trend emerged later in the form of

the so-called Kontext-Kunst (Context art), which on the one hand saw itself as

part of the tradition of institutional critique, but on the other was attempting

to open up art institutions to non-art practices to which it was previously

unconnected.



68

The Exhibitionist

3. Julia Bryan-Wilson, “A Curricu-

lum of Institutional Critique” in

New Institutionalism, 89–109.

Whereas orthodox institutional critique is predicated upon the supposi-

tion (and I am simplifying to an extent) that there is an inherent conict be-

tween the artist and the institution, the second phase of institutional critique

is a more collaborative affair and utilizes the exhibition as a space to draw

attention to its operations. After institutional critique’s renaissance during the

1990s made renewed reference from the artists’ point of view to the symbolicrules that differentiate art from the broad eld of non-art, the institutional

context functions nowadays predominantly as a privileged place in which

the focus can be directed toward that sociopolitical “outside the white cube”

which is itself ltered out of the internal system. By means of targeted inter-

ventions, reality outside art has found its way, legitimated as art, into the in-

terior space. The relationship between art and non-art denes itself here just

as strategically as it does situationally: There is an outside to which reference

is duly made, but this is not contextualized completely as art by virtue of the

reference alone. Instead of fundamentally questioning the symbolic borders

of the art space per se, its rules and ways of functioning are temporarily trans-

ferred to areas that gain a new interest and also a politicization through this

very framework.

Art institutions are no longer viewed as sites of cultural and political ex-

clusion deserving of critique and indeed attack. Instead, contemporary criti-

cal institutional discourse is propagated—and here we arrive at the subject in

question—chiey by curators and museum directors. The transformation of

the institution and the extension of its scope of action have become a shared

goal. However, over time the broadened version of institutional critique has

also progressed from a critical form of art practice to a more general atti-tude toward the “operating system,” which can in turn be adopted by artists,

curators, and critics alike. A command of “the curriculum of institutional

critique” has become a matter of course.3

This shift—which is owed in equal measure to both the success of in-

stitutional critique and its historicization, so that it has now become part of

an art-historical canon as well as curatorial training—engenders a variety of

paracuratorial activities. The majority of these activities take place in a eld

which itself examines the possibilities of curatorial practice beyond (now rare)

rigid institutional formats. Whereas there are experts for the classical activities

of communication (press ofcer, art educator), the curator, as auteur, adopts

the role of the critic channelling the debate, productively extending the cura-

torial remit. He or she knows that things are possible within the institutional

framing of art that are (no longer) possible elsewhere. This framing is perhaps

the most important aspect for the various conferences and publications initi-

ated independently of exhibitions, for the political engagement of individual

institutions, and for their contribution to sociopolitical initiatives for change.

On the other hand, the academic world hardly has the nancial resources



69

Response IV

4. Genette, Paratexts , 15.

5. Ibid.

to publish its research in book form. Institutions publish not only exhibition

catalogues but also anthologies, collections of essays, conference minutes, and

other kinds of documentation. The likelihood of listening to a lecture by a re-

nowned philosopher held in a museum, a municipal art gallery, an art center,

or a conference organized by one of these institutions is signicantly greater

than doing so in a university. This development becomes problematic when academic training be-

comes increasingly market-oriented, generously leaving the elds adapted

from the art industry itself to the art industry; when art institutions become

places that organize not only exhibitions but also university-level conferenc-

es and establish their own albeit temporary academies, and universities are

forced to withdraw from these arenas out of political considerations; when

cultural policy is only prepared to sanction the funding of the institution’s

disseminative role and duly cuts structural funding; when conditions are laid

down as to which paracuratorial activities need to be performed and which

do not. In times when universities are being restructured and the humanities

actively curtailed, when art academies are being forced to obey the call for

efciency, one shouldn’t redistribute their duties unquestioningly.

With all due sympathy for the extended forms of curatorial activity,

the exhibition and dissemination of art should move to center stage once

more, and the accompanying apparatuses that frame it and the discourse it

produces should be supported by a commonality of interest in these two core

elements. That would constitute a plea for broad-based forms of dissemina-

tion to a heterogeneous audience as well as for the integration of adjacent

elds into a curatorial discourse which itself reects the political, social, andeconomic “outside.” The art system is in a powerful position at the moment

to be able to appropriate many discourses and elds of activity and engage-

ment. We ought not to forget that other places exist where much of what

we increasingly nd ourselves doing is also done—places like universities,

repertory cinemas, community centers, and so on, and which merely await

our willingness to cooperate.

The classical paratext is “a zone between text and off-text, a zone not

only of transition, but also of transaction.”4 As a transitional zone it is part of

neither one eld nor the other. From the point of view of a text, it belongs

to the context, but from that of the context, it is part of the text. At best, it

is a switching point and interface, with the capacity to initiate communica-

tive processes. Ultimately it is a profoundly heteronomic, auxiliary discourse

operating in the service of a different enterprise, which provides its very jus-

tication for existence: “Irrespective of the degree of aesthetic or ideological

content, coquettishness, and paradoxical reversals the author may choose to

introduce into a paratextual element, it is always subordinate to ‘his’ text and

this functionality signicantly determines its composition and its existence.”5



70

The Exhibitionist

Even if the shifts of position within the curatorial per se and its interplay

with other spheres of activity and social contexts are indeed irreversible—and

are not meant to be reconsidered here at all—the exhibition itself still ought

to move center stage more emphatically as a unique format for the produc-

tion of meaning. Collaborations with experts from other elds are explicitly

recommended in this endeavor. The endless extension of curatorial practiceitself will lead to a one-sided upgrading of the gure of the curator in the

eld of the production and dissemination of knowledge. Reection on, and

commentary upon, existing social, political, and economic conditions in the

sphere of art must be a joint enterprise—for artists, curators, and their public.

In this sense, the paracuratorial would also ideally be a switching point and

interface for the initiation of communicative processes.

Translated from the German by Timothy Cornell



71

Response IV

Made by curators for curators, The Exhibitionist has set out to create, as Jens

Hoffmann states in the rst issue, a “consistent platform for more frequent

and interconnected conversations” about curatorial practice. The aim is not

so much to provide historical data as to enhance a dialogue about the still

somehow priviliged domain of exhibition making. Declaring the renowned

French journal Cahiers du cinéma as its main source of inspiration, The Ex-

hibitionist invites critical revisiting of signicant exhibitions and insight into

their making. Basing its approach on comparativity, the journal also zooms

in on specic issues (curatorial responsibility, mediation, learning, education,

interactivity, collaboration, the public, authorship, et cetera) and in relation to

them suggests some rethinking of the curatorial vocabulary as well.

The essays connect a number of approaches, types, and strategies of

curatorial engagement, and they bring into the conversation the highly po-lemical issue of curatorial subjectivity and creative authorship. Rethinking

exhibitions that either represented or presaged radical shifts in art practice

and exhibition making—for instance Innovations in Croatian Art in the 1970s by

Davor Matic̆evic ́ and Marijan Susovski in Zagreb in 1982, the much-cited

Chambres d’Amis by Jan Hoet in Ghent in 1986, or The Short Century: Independence

and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 by Okwui Enwezor in New York

in 2002—is also saturated with the need to look at how the exhibition as a

dominant format has been (and can be) challenged with respect to constantly

evolving needs and concerns.

The aim of every fourth issue (of which this is the rst iteration) is to

offer responses to and reections on the preceding three, as well as to hint at

possible future subjects and directions. I was asked to contribute a text about

the “paracuratorial,” dened by Jens Hoffmann in his emailed invitation as

activities that “sit outside the idea of curating as bound to exhibition mak -

ing.” The term, which encompasses lectures, interviews, educational events,

residencies, publications, screenings, readings, and performances, implies an

intertwining net of activities as well as diverse modes of operation and con-

versation based on more occasional, temporary alliances of artists, curators,

NOTES ON THE

PARACURATORIAL

Lívia Páldi



73

Response IV

mann, following his controversial 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form:

Live in Your Head, envisioned and realized an “event-oriented” Documenta

that worked halfway between “abandoning the institution to street, and arbi-

trariness” and “the seminar-type approach that would have turned its back to

the original(ity of the) event.”2 In its complex handling, Documenta 5 merged

diverse sources, practices, authorial commitments, and ways of viewing. It notonly reconsidered the concepts of publicness and the exhibition as a public

space, but also helped to develop a more articulated interplay with the public.

Documenta has historically been an exhibition that lasts for 100 days, but

lately the temporal scope of the exhibition has been extended so that activi-

ties begin long before the opening date. The events leading to the “nal” stage

take various forms (Documenta 11 was organized as a series of ve platforms,

Documenta 12 engaged in a magazine project, et cetera) and occupy different

statuses within the projects.

The last decade generated a new wave of discussions about the present

and future roles of museums as public institutions and the capacities and po-

tentials to synchronize their historical functions with the economic, cultural,

and political changes that are pressuring and reshaping artistic and curatorial

work. On the other hand there have also been varied debates on the place

and possibilities of criticality independent from institutions and the market.

We are living in an age that is literally drowning in events, with the hyp-

ing of event culture and an almost fetishistic, marketing-driven, festivalizing

approach to discursivity. In this context, paracuratorial activities can both

support this overabundance and facilitate a counterow to overwrite existing

scenarios. The following examples indicate some ways in which different institu-

tions have utilized the “halfway between”—the migratory, transient charac-

ter of paracuratorial agendas—not only to facilitate more discussion about

agency but also to support the reinvention/redenition of their scopes of

operation and enhance their capacities in a debate-based institutional frame-

work. The experiences these institutional projects gather extend from exible

roundtables (such as the protoacademy initiated at Edinburgh College of Art

by Charles Esche) to integrations into the biennial mode. They contribute

to the questioning of institutional and academic hierarchies, and to the po-

tentials within institutions to connect with artistic and curatorial strategies

reective of contemporary social and political urgencies, as well as to local

histories.

Developed both inside and outside the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven,

the Netherlands, the two-year project (begun in January 2007) Be(com)ing

Dutch, led by Charles Esche and Annie Fletcher, debated Dutch national iden-

tity in the globalized world while putting forward a challenge for the museum

to become politically proactive in its provincial hometown. Realized through

2. Alex Farquharson, “Bureaux

de change,” Frieze no. 101 (Sep-

tember 2006), http://www.frieze.

com/issue/article/bureaux_de_

change.



74

The Exhibitionist

a series of talks, panels, workshops, major public discussions such as the Eind-

hoven Caucus, and an exhibition, Be(com)ing Dutch asked “whether art might

offer alternative examples of thinking about how we might live together to-

day” and how we deal with the critical challenges associated with that, among

them escalating processes of inclusion and exclusion.3

Be(com)ing Dutch put to use different forms and media to communicatethe distinct roles of art and culture (and the institution) in imagining the

future. In many ways it continued what Esche proposed with the Rooseum

in Malmö (he was the director there in 2000–4) by attributing transforma-

tive public potential to an art institution. His text “What’s the Point of Art

Centres Anyway? Possibility, Art, and Democratic Deviance” translates like

a statement about the necessity to rethink art institutions as public spaces

that are reective of their immediate surroundings and historical moment. It

envisions “something close to that mix of community centre, club, academy,

and showroom” and a freedom that “encourages disagreement, incoherence,

uncertainty, and unpredictable results.”4 The writer and curator Paul O’Neill

closed his exhibition review of Be(com)ing Dutch by describing a performance/

demonstration on Dutch colonial history that had to be canceled due to pub -

lic pressure and threats. He indicated this as a new point of departure toward

the envisaged position and possibilities of the institution having a say within

the “real” public arena.5

“Dialogue is a precondition of moving things along” served as a dia-

lectical principle, motto, and leitmotif of the 5th Berlin Biennale in 2008,

titled When Things Cast No Shadows. Curated by Adam Szymczyk and Elena

Filipovic, it announced itself as taking the form of an “open structure in vemovements without a plot” and offered the most extensive event series in the

history of the Berlin Biennale. The night program, Mes nuits sont plus belles que

vos jours, involving more than 100 practitioners (artists, producers, writers, et

cetera), served as the activated intersection both inside and outside of the

dominant exhibition venues (Kunst-Werke, Neue Nationalgalerie, Schinkel

Pavilion, and Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum as well as those being involved

on occasion, such as Kino Arsenal and Volksbühne). Among other events, it

included lectures on Modernism in the 1950s in Yugoslavia, “Dustination,”

automobiles, and hypnagogia as well as lm screenings and city tours (includ-

ing a visit to the city’s 1980s-era civil defense complexes, remnants of the

Cold War).

When Things Cast No Shadows proposed a tactical balance between the

exhibition (daytime) and paracuratorial activities that took hold during post-

exhibition hours and the nighttime. While undoubtedly playing with the con-

scious/subconscious analogy, it gave countenance to the curatorial focus on

processes and irregularity. Like its reader/catalogue, it became an edition of

heterogenous acts and productions, activating different moods and lines of

thought.

3. Annie Fletcher, Be(com)ing

Dutch abstract, published by the

European Cultural Foundation,

2007, http://www.eurocult.org/

uploads/docs/794.pdf.

4. Charles Esche, “What’s the

Point of Art Centres Anyway? Pos-

sibility, Art, and Democratic Devi-

ance,” republicart (April 2004),http://www.republicart.net/disc/

institution/esche01_en.htm.

5. Paul O’Neill, “ Be(com)ing

Dutch,” Art Monthly (October

2008): 23.



75

Response IV

While the 5th Berlin Biennale balanced curatorial with paracuratorial

modes, the planning and afterlife of the failed critical and educational endea-

vour that was Manifesta 6 gave primacy to the event-driven mode of working.

Inspired by the legendary Black Mountain College, the curators proposed

to bring about an art school in collaboration with a collection of people in

Nicosia in Cyprus, as they believed that “a truly progressive art school needsto respond to what is lacking within institutional spaces of culture and seek to

transform everyday life.”6 Though the process was delayed for diverse (politi-

cal and other) reasons and eventually canceled, one of the curators, Anton

Vidokle, in collaboration with Boris Groys, Jalal Touc, Liam Gillick, Martha

Rosler, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Nikolaus Hirsch, Tirdad Zolghadr, Walid

Raad, and a great number of other artists, writers, philosophers, and the pub-

lic, transformed the research that had already been undertaken into an inde-

pendent project. During its 12-month operation in Berlin, Unitednationsplaza

hosted a great number of seminars, screenings, book presentations, and other

projects, and it led to other variations on the theme, including Night School at

the New Museum in New York.

Largely dened by the cultural environment in which they take place,

paracuratorial activities can gain a very special momentum. Questioning

the denition of publicness, including what and where can be public, was

the main impetus for the curatorial duo Aleya Hamza and Edit Molnár in

Cairo—who were running the Contemporary Image Collective (CiC) between

2007 and 2009—to initiate and organize Tales Around the Pavement in 2008.

They helped to produce events that explored “the complex relationships and

shifting dynamics between people and public space in the context of a mega-city like Cairo, in which the notion of public space and its various functions,

ofcial and informal, is constantly negotiated and redened.”7 Some lasting

more than a week and others only a few hours, these “ephemeral disruptions

of the urban landscape” necessarily involved being both confrontational and

politically provocative.

In a context where institutional spaces of culture are scarce and dis-

cussions about contemporary art are practiced via only a few protagonists,

Tales Around the Pavement activated the “halfway between” as a series of hybrid

actions to acquire knowledge about how publicness and public places exist

in downtown Cairo. The organizers appropriated everyday street routines

and guerilla tactics that people develop in the megacity, and merged these

with previous artistic research. The project thus represented a slightly twisted

situation, very different from those canonized forms of public art that dene

themselves in relation to white cube practices. For instance, to set up Trans-

mission: A TV-Based Urban Situation in Mounira (close to the villa where CiC

worked)—a fake urban middle-class living room situated on the pavement

with TV monitor displays—the artist Mahmoud Hamdy had difculties re-

questing permits and operating his project. Though watching football in shop

6. See http://manifesta.org/

wordpress/wp-content/up-

loads/2010/07/NotesForAnA-

rtSchool.pdf.

7. See http://universes-in-

universe.org/eng/nafas/

articles/2008/tales_around_the_

pavement.



76

The Exhibitionist

window displays of stores selling audiovisual equipment is a common practice

in downtown Cairo, the artist’s negotiations with shop owners pointed at the

ill-dened borders between public and private as well as the indistinctness

concerning the Emergency Law and its restrictions on freedom of assembly

in public spaces.8

In conditions where institutions and academies are almost nonexistent,or do not allow for progressive testing of curatorial operation, the paracura-

torial format can provide a model to link and mobilize diverse energies and

practices in the form of temporary events and ephemeral structures. This also

applies in places where politics pervades culture and its institutions, and either

annuls their activities or degenerates them into propaganda and marketing.

Here paracuratorial practices and strategies may counteract over-ideologized

institutions and their stiffened protocols, and maintain space for discourse

and independent curatorial work. In countries such as Hungary, where semi-

underground existence has always been a well-known mode of critical opera-

tion, soon again this existence will be the only relevant way to continue debate

and conversation.

8. See http://hamzamolnar.

wordpress.com/2010/06/29/

tales-around-the-pavement/.



77

Response IV

As a curator primarily involved in producing artists’ works that are often con-

stituted through live events and other discursive processes that take place both

inside and outside the gallery, I have to confess that I have struggled with the

term “paracuratorial.” At face value it posits a frame that is centered on the

exhibition, making separations between what takes place inside and outside

of it, thus suggesting a center and periphery and reinforcing borders that are

now disregarded by many artists and curators. The question of boundaries

does, however, prompt some further thinking about where the borders of

institutions and artistic and curatorial practices now lie, what they can accom-

modate and not, and what other kinds of paramaters they encounter (social,

political, economic) and how these are negotiated and shifted.

While the paracuratorial positions a frame inside and outside of which

curatorial activity takes place, one could say that the curatorial as a practicehas gone beyond the binaries of inside and outside, as Irit Rogoff has written:

In a sense “the curatorial” is thought and critical thought at that, that does not rush to

embody itself, does not rush to concretise itself, but allows us to stay with the questions

until they point us in some direction we might have not been able to predict. . . . Mov-

ing to “the curatorial” then, is an opportunity to “unbound” the work from all of those

categories and practices that limit its ability to explore that which we do not yet know or

that which is not yet a subject in the world.1

Here the conventional idea of curating as bound to exhibitions in a physical

space has shifted to a conceptual space, a productive space of encounter where

different forms of knowledge and practices may intersect, a methodology that

is in process, through which problems may be inhabited and grappled with

without the need for objective distance. Thus one could ask whether the cura-

torial in this sense still has, or needs, borders? And in relation to this, could the

curatorial become a vehicle to access what lies beyond them—the unknown,

unintended, uninvited, unacknowledged, suppressed, uncomfortable—often

the things that arrive through the event in the moment when something is put

THE DOG THAT

BARKED AT THE ELEPHAN T

IN THE ROOM

Emily Pethick

1. Ir it Rogoff, “Smuggling: An

Embodied Criticality,” eipcp.net/

dlfiles/rogoff-smuggling.



78

The Exhibitionist

out into the public realm and ushers a response. Could it be these factors that

linger beyond the horizon of the curatorial that the paracuratorial may now

encompass? One could start this investigation by looking at what’s not there,

and what is there but unacknowledged, and what happens when these enter

into the frame, or the frame expands to include them.

“In general, we see ourselves as the outspoken distant relative at the annual reunion who

can be counted on to bring up the one subject no one wants to talk about.”

—Group Material, “On Democracy,” 1990

While the shifts from objective exhibitions toward more discursive models are

extensive to track, two artist-led curatorial projects at the Dia Art Founda-

tion in New York in 1988 and 1989 specically did much to break down the

“cultural connement”2 of the gallery. The rst was Democracy, organized by

Group Material, which involved four exhibitions as well as private meetings,

public assemblies, and town meetings. The approach, as described by Group

Material member Doug Ashford, was to “directly engage an audience that

would actually move objects in and out of the gallery in response to the politi-

cal reality of the day, the week, or month: an exhibition that would change

with the people who came to see it.” The second was Martha Rosler’s If You

Lived Here…, which involved lm and video producers, photographers, archi-

tects, planners, homeless people, squatters, activist groups, and schoolchildren

in addressing contested living situations, architecture, planning, and utopian

visions, primarily in the local context of New York. Each exhibited artwork

was presented alongside a host of other artifacts, demonstrating broad, inclu-

sive ways of opening up the exhibition to those who might in the past havebeen excluded, and debating problems and conditions that at that time were

marginalized and hard to speak about.3 In her essay “Preface: The Work of

Art in the (Imagined) Age of the Unalienated Exhibition,” the artist Yvonne

Rainer (who was responsible for bringing the projects to the Dia Foundation)

described how they resonated: “What surfaced again and again as one spent

time in these seemingly chaotic installations was the conict between ofcial

utterance and nonofcial representations of everyday life, between the exalt-

ed bromides of Western democracy and their thinly disguised ‘freedoms.’”4

The event-based nature of the work showed ways of approaching knowl-

edge and experience that were still in the process of being thought through—

that resisted easy resolution, and that could not be contained but needed to

be lived through, shared, and kept open. Furthermore, they demonstrated

the potential of the event to incorporate more than one voice, coming from

different positions with sometimes contradictory viewpoints—including the

“voice” of the institution—and how the intersection of these produces not

only new knowledge, but a more complex picture.

This method of opening up a problem to participation through the

staging of an event is a central methodology in Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s

2. In the words of Robert Smith-

son, “Cultural Confinement” in

Robert Smithson: The Collected

Writings , ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley

and Los Angeles: UC Press, 1996).

3. In Democracy and If You Lived

Here…, artists became curators,

but worked in a way that was

closely aligned to the role oforganizer (in the activist sense).

The exhibitions took place at a

time when institutional critique

was in full swing as a practice

that consistently questioned who

or what was not included in the

institutional “frame” and the con-

ditions within which works were

situated, although institutional

critique itself has been criticized

for internalizing questions within

the field of art. I believe that these

examples demonstrate a shift to a

radically externalizing approach.

4. Yvonne Rainer, “Preface: The

Work of Art in the (Imagined) Age

of the Unalienated Exhibition”

in If You Lived Here: The City in

Art, Theory, and Social Activism: A

Project by Martha Rosler , ed. Brian

Wallis (Seattle: The New Press,

1991): 12.



79

Response IV

Maurits Script , a lm that looks at “unofcial” Dutch colonial history in north-

east Brazil. It was rst presented in 2006 at Casco in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Van Oldenborgh’s script edited together narratives sourced from both

“ofcial” and more informal accounts of what took place at the time, offering

often-contradictory points of view on the celebrated governorship of Johan

Maurits and the lesser-recognized aspects of his governance, such as his treat-ment of slaves and “natives.”

Van Oldenborgh shot the entire lm in a one-day open shoot in the

Golden Room of Maurits’s former residence, now the renowned museum

Mauritshaus. He cast a group of nonprofessional actors, each of whom had a

different personal relationship to the issues raised in the script. They indepen -

dently played out their roles before a single camera on one side of the room,

and on the other side engaged in an open conversation with the other actors

about legacies of colonial histories, revealing at times conicting viewpoints.

The unraveling of these multiple accounts at the heart the museum created a

counternarrative that addressed the unspoken conditions under which much

of the museum’s collection, and the building itself, had been produced. At

the same time, the museum’s everyday routines continued, including a guided

tour, which kept to its usual route and went straight through the lm shoot.

Captured on camera, the guide entering the ofcial narrative into this site of

dissent further complicates the layering of insider and outsider positions and

creates an ambiguity as to whether the “real” has entered the “unreal” (of the

lm set), or vice versa. While culminating in a lm that was exhibited else-

where, it was the event of the production of the work that created a discursive

site where many intersecting knowledges wrestled one another to create adensely layered narrative that resisted resolution.

While van Oldenborgh’s project pushed against the ofcial narrative of

the museum from within, Petra Bauer and Annette Krauss’s project Read the

Masks: Tradition Is Not Given had a more radically externalizing effect. It was

produced as part of Be(com)ing Dutch, a two-year research project and exhibi-

tion (the exhibition component took place in 2008) at the Van Abbemuseum

in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, on issues concerning Dutch national identity.

Read the Masks aimed to open up a debate about Zwarte Piet, a popular tradi-

tional Dutch pre-Christmas character whose distinguishing features include

a black face, red lips, and dark curly hair. Through a series of public events,

Bauer and Krauss worked toward the production of a lm, which was to

begin with a protest march planned in collaboration with two Dutch activist

groups. The march aimed to publicly give voice to the long marginalized and

suppressed critique of Zwarte Piet.

A few days before the march, extensive media coverage triggered hun-

dreds, if not thousands, of negative reactions, many of them very extreme,

including threats of violence against the participants. The museum canceled

the march, and thereby drew a line in the sand that ultimately inuenced



80

The Exhibitionist

the shape of the work. The media attention—which was even mentioned

in parliament—revealed a widespread, deep-seated refusal to acknowledge

the problematics around this tradition and triggered complex discussions on

national identity, racism, freedom of speech, and whether the art institution

was a place for reection or action, thus bringing the museum once again

into the frame, this time to have its funding threatened. A frequent accusa -tion against the artists was that they were not Dutch, thus “outsiders” who

were not entitled speak about this, even though Krauss had been living in the

Netherlands for some years. The project opened up a space in which issues

could be discussed, yet the explosiveness of the debate was almost too much

for the museum to handle.

This was the only part of Be(com)ing Dutch that touched such a nerve

and tackled some of the painful questions that it set out to address. Excerpts

from a semi-public roundtable discussion held at the museum are threaded

through the subsequent lm Read the Masks: Tradition Is Not Given and tease out

some of the intricacies of this story. At one point in the lm, the museum

curator Annie Fletcher is asked whether the museum has seen “a change in

its politics as a result of the project.” She responds: “We have learned a lot

from the whole process. But also when it comes to decision making, thinking

more about what we produce as a ‘cultural temple.’ What we collect, how we

collect, the politics of collecting. And how we understand the museum as a

public space. And who has access to this public space.” The acknowledgment

of the struggle that the institution went through and the changes that resulted

shows that the museum as frame is not xed; Fletcher’s statement of this is

also now part of the nal work itself. To publicly address uncomfortable questions that usually linger outside

the frame of representation was a central concern of the 2011 exhibition

Cinenova: Reproductive Labour at the Showroom in London. Cinenova is a lm

distribution company that was founded in 1991 as the outcome of a merger of

two self-organized feminist lm and video distributors, Circles and Cinema of

Women. Each was formed in the early 1980s in response to the lack of recog -

nition of women in the history of the moving image. Cinema of Women had

come to exist partly in response to the exhibition Film as Film organized by the

English Arts Council in 1979, which marginalized women lmmakers to such

an extent that the women on the exhibition committee (Lis Rhodes, Annabel

Nicholson, and Felicity Sparrow) decided to withhold their work from the

exhibition and issued the essay “Women and the Formal Film” in explanation

of their stance. They described their idea of showing historical experimental

lm alongside “an active space within the exhibition where contemporary

women could show personal statements and histories, nd their own continu-

ity, and share ideas for future shows,” conditions that were difcult to realize

within the hostile and hierarchical structures then predominant within the



81

Response IV

organizing institution. “In general,” they continued, “we object to the idea

of a closed art exhibition which presents its subject anonymously, dening its

truth in Letraset and four foot display panels, denying the space within it to

answer back, to add or disagree, denying the ideological implications inher-

ent in the pursuit of an academic dream, the uncomplicated pattern where

everything ts.”5

Twenty-two years later, a more active space for the exhibition of wom-

en’s lm was created at the Showroom, taking the form of Reproductive Labour .

It was organized by a Working Group made up of Cinenova volunteers, who

are involved in the practical running of Cinenova. The Working Group was

constituted through the project, but also out of an urgency to save the organi-

zation from economic instability and material deterioration, and it developed

the project through a dialogue that took place over two years and uidly tra-

versed practical, economic, concepetual, and political factors. To represent

the organization and its work, they brought to the venue the 500 lm titles

that Cinenova distributes, their equipment, and an archive of paper materi-

als. Members of the Working Group were present in the exhibition to meet

visitors as well as to carry out the daily work of Cinenova. During this time

they also began the task of digitizing the lms in its holdings in order to pre-

serve them and make them more accessible—a project requiring space, time,

and facilities. In exposing this work and the conditions surrounding it, the

exhibition explicitly aimed to make public and urgent Cinenova’s precarious

situation, particularly in terms of the voluntary labor that sustains it, and to

socialize these struggles, creating a site that could give rise to reections on

the desires and problematics of collective cultural work and the difculty ofsustaining critical culture. As an exhibition it resisted a closed form. Its lms

and other displayed materials changed each day, and a number of events

were planned spontaneously in response to particular interests and ideas of

those who visited.

Projects such as the ones described here shake institutional structures

and dance between binaries of inside and outside, but one must remember

that these are essentially articial boundaries that are sustained by certain

kinds of institutional practices. The “paracuratorial” is a useful tool to think

through practices that have shifted away from conventional exhibition for-

mats and refuse to be contained, but it still posits a boundary and sustains

an unnecessary dualism. “The curatorial” in contrast is recognized as an un-

bounded framework that is specualtive and responsive, which allows for the

possibility that one might not yet know at the outset of a project what one is

grappling with, and that it may change in the process of being realized. At the

same time, artistic and curatorial practices involve negotiations with a whole

range of factors, and thus cannot be entirely borderless—there must be a

horizon—and it is often at the points at which obstacles and boundaries are

5. Annabel Nicolson, Felicity

Sparrow, Jane Clarke, Jeanette

Iljon, Lis Rhodes, Mary Pat Leece,

Pat Murphy, and Susan Stein,

“Women and the Formal Film” in

Film as Film, Formal Experiment in

Film 1910–75 , ed. Phil Drummond

(London: Arts Council of Great

Britain, 1979): 118.



82

The Exhibitionist

encountered that challenging practices and ideas emerge and create change.

While acknowledging the presence of a horizon, when taking into consider-

ation the multitude of factors (both intended and unintended) that enter into

the “event” and the undeniable presence of the conditions that produce these,

it is almost impossible to close the frame. And if one tries, the suppressed of -

ten makes its way back in, if only in the guise of a badly behaved visitor. Toallow these ouside inuences to enter into the picture creates the possibility of

addressing complexity and working with it.



83

The Exhibitionist

LA CRITIQUE

Miguel A. López

Lawrence Rinder

Tina Kukielski

Mia Jankowicz

Jarrett Gregory

Rodrigo Moura



84

BEYOND

PARTICIPATION

Miguel A. López

Joshua Decter offers three provocative

ideas in his text “Everywhereness,”

published in The Exhibitionist no. 2: that

all space has been converted into a po-

tential art space, that the difference be-

tween public and private is beginning

to dissolve, and that the tricky rhetoric

about “participatory work” is beginning

to serve as a xed stereotype of the so-

called “emancipatory” potential of art. Decter signals the necessity of skep-

ticism in the face of an oversimplied

narrative in which “collectivity” is the

“progressive” ideal to which all art must

aspire. Nonetheless, despite the impor-

tance of suspicion when confronted

with said afrmation, we run the risk

of avoiding the antagonisms and fric-

tions within the heterogeneous debates

in recent years about “participation”

and “collectivity.” An attentive analy-sis cannot ignore the waves of protests

that have been stimulating the radical

imagination of the West since at least

the late 1990s (such as the movements

against corporate globalization since

1999 in Seattle, or the indigenous up-

risings in Mexico since the Zapatistas),

which have had as much resonance in

the realm of art as in social practice. We

must distrust not only the false equiva-

lence of “collectivity” and “democra-

cy” as Decter implies, but also the viewof the art world as a place that inevita-

bly neutralizes the critical potential of

the experience of art. Some time ago

the writer and scholar Stephen Wright

encouraged “escaping” the art world

frame as one of the “most exciting

developments in art,” which required

sacricing “one’s coefcient of artistic

visibility, but potentially in exchange for

great corrosiveness toward the domi-

nant semiotic order.”1 But is it possible

to avoid this “frame”? And does that

ight assure the desired liberty and ef-

fectiveness? In her performance Tatlin’s

Whisper #6 at the 10th Havana Biennial

in 2009, Tania Bruguera used exactlythis art world frame to install a tempo-

rary public platform (a stage with a po-

dium, two microphones, and big golden

curtains) so that anybody could freely

say for a minute anything they wanted

to, something that the repressive Cuban

regime rarely permitted.

Beyond any rhetoric of participa-

tion, in circumstances of control of free

speech, it is precisely the mobilization

of voices, images, and bodies that allows

the toppling of governments, and (asrecently seen in Tunisia and Egypt) not

just through academic chatter or inter-

national diplomacy. Latin America and

its terrible decades of dictatorships have

been extreme ground for these initia-

tives of resistance, but to try to measure

their so-called effectiveness is always

slippery territory, as Decter correctly

warns. Recently the Peruvian writer

José Luis Falconi declared the failure of

Siluetazo (1983), the improvised collectivemaking of silhouettes in Argentina in

which demonstrators lay down, offer-

ing their bodies for others to trace and

outline in an allusion to those who were

missing. This collective visual protest was

led by the Argentinean group Madres

de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Dis-

appeared) at a time when the military

regime (1976–83) was still in power.

Falconi cited the apparent impossibil-

ity of transforming their vast protests

into realpolitik—“their failure to really amount to something decisive in the po-

litical realm (to make justice, purely and

simply).”2 But can we really judge the

political achievements of an aesthetic

exercise by its eventual translation into

pragmatic judicial or legal action?

Old divisions between public and

private appear to be dissolving in the

age of information, as Decter suggests,

but it would be naive to optimistically

believe that this digital domain is about

autonomous spaces already won. “Is

there really any space that is more pub-

lic than the Internet as a cosmos . . .?

What isn’t accessible, and therefore

somehow public?” he claims, noticingat once the seeming widening of the

“public” itself and the furthest desire

of artistic practice to inltrate every-

where. But beyond art expectations, is

this new “digital social reality” capable

of replacing traditional conceptions of

“public,” or even prepared to announce

the end of the old “public sphere” as a

physical space of political deliberation

and participation, which is fundamen-

tal to democracy? Is the construction of

virtual communities the ultimate futureof this everywhereness? I don’t think so.

To put it in other words: Even with the

linking capabilities of digital technolo-

gies, would the recent Egyptian revolu-

tion have been possible without (mil-

lions of protesters physically gathered

in) a place like Tahrir Square?

Translated from the Spanish by Megan Hanley

Notes

1. Stephen Wright, “Users and Usership of Art:

Challenging Expert Culture,” lecture presented

in the seminar “Musée d’Art Ancien, Dépar-

tement d’Art Moderne: Rethinking Cultural

Organizations in the New Cultural Economy” at

MACBA, Barcelona, June 12–13, 2008.

2. José Luis Falconi, “Two Double Negatives” in

The Meaning of Photography, eds. Robin Kelsey

and Blake Stimson (Williamstown, Massachu-

setts: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute,

2008): 136.

CURATORIALCONTROL

Lawrence Rinder

I concur that curators have subjectivi-

ties, and that an exhibition expresses the

curator’s perspective and aesthetic sen-

sibility. I can even accept that at times

the boundary between curator and

The Exhibitionist



85

La Critique

artist is blurred, not only when a rec-

ognized artist curates an exhibition, but

also when a professional curator comes

up with an exceptionally brilliant and

beautiful show. Up to this point I am

in agreement with Jens Hoffmann’s ap-plication of auteur theory to curatorial

practice in the “Overture” of The Exhi-

bitionist no. 1, which he further claried

in the “Endnote” of The Exhibitionist

no. 2. But I have some reservations.

In “Endnote,” Hoffmann writes:

“To reduce the relationship between

artist and curator to a simple antago-

nistic binary, an enduring conict and

power struggle, is at best outdated and

at worst outright reactionary.” But this

kind of binary is precisely what is im-plied by invoking auteur theory, which

solidly places the lm director at the

apex of power in the grand collabora-

tion that is lmmaking. And the debate

over authorial control that was played

out in the world of cinema in the 1960s

(that is, directors versus screenwriters,

cinematographers, et cetera) seems ar-

chaic today. We all know that there is no

such thing as a neutral setting and that

organizing works of art into any kind ofcontext is dependent on the organizer’s

intention, ideology, and aesthetic con-

ception. Why not leave things in a state

of negotiated balance, accepting that

everyone has some stake in the recep-

tion and meaning of art? Why insist

that the curator comes out on top?

Second, I have a lingering feeling

that artistic integrity matters and that,

if it comes to a decisive choice, an art-

ist’s vision should trump a curator’s. I

understand that it is a matter of de-gree and I’m fully aware of how simply

placing one work next to another is in

some sense an imposition on “pure”

experience. But should curators really

do anything they want with someone

else’s art? There are many shadings of

this curatorial responsibility. For In a

Different Light, an exhibition I curated in

1995 with Nayland Blake, we contacted

every living artist we hoped to include,

described the theme of the show and

overall methodology, and asked their

permission to have their work displayed

(even if we were not borrowing a work

directly from them). In one instance, in

which an artist voiced objections, we re-moved their work from the checklist. We

did not, however, tell the artists precisely

how their work would be deployed and,

indeed, the show was extremely rich in

implicit associations based on syntactic

juxtapositions. Were we overly cautious

in the rst instance and unethical in the

latter? Did it matter that my co-curator

was an artist and brought an artist’s sen-

sibility to the project? In the same exhi-

bition we also hoped to include a work

by Frida Kahlo from the collection ofthe Museum of Modern Art, New York.

For some reason I can’t recall, we were

unable to obtain the painting and so

simply exhibited a printed reproduction

of it (though the work was not included

in the catalogue’s checklist). This begs

the question of different treatments for

living and dead artists. Without Kahlo

around to object, this curatorial choice

was much easier to make.

The framing of an exhibition, andthe art it includes, is crucial. For Hide/

Seek: Difference and Desire in American Por -

traiture, an exhibition that opened in

2010 at the National Portrait Gallery,

co-curators Jonathan D. Katz and David

C. Ward edited unidentied lm foot-

age found in the studio of the deceased

artist David Wojnarowicz, added audio,

and presented the resulting video as A

Fire in My Belly, which is actually the title

of a quite different, considerably longer

and unnished silent lm by Wojnaro-wicz. The fact that the new video does

not appear in the exhibition catalogue

suggests that the curators themselves

were initially reserved about its artistic

and/or authorial status. But after the

piece was censored by the Secretary

of the Smithsonian Institution, all am-

biguity vanished in face of the need to

circle the wagons around “artistic free-

dom.” The censored video—presented

as Wojnarowicz’s art—was screened by

galleries and museums across the coun-

try and, today, this video, which David

Wojnarowicz did not make, has become

his best-known work.

Wojnarowicz spent several preciousmonths of his nal years ghting in

court to protect his work from being ed-

ited, manipulated, and misrepresented

by others. The specic “other” in the

1990 lawsuit was the odious American

Family Association, whereas some have

said that Katz and Ward’s video is in

keeping with the artist’s intention. Yet

we can never know for sure. I believe

that what was being asked of the cura-

torial in Hide/Seek —and indeed of all

the galleries and museums that screenedthis work under Wojnarowicz’s name—

is more authorship and control than the

practice can responsibly bear.

Jens Hoffmann believes that the

role of the curator is to bring a measure

of control (and, I am sure, inspiration)

to the presentation of art. In his “Over-

ture” he writes, “The curatorial process

is indeed a selection process, an act of

choosing from a number of possibilities,

an imposition of order within a eld ofmultiple (and multiplying) artistic con-

cerns. A curator’s role is precisely to

limit, exclude, and create meaning us-

ing existing signs, codes, and materials.”

This could be an innocuous descrip-

tion of traditional curatorial work, or

it could be interpreted as a polemical

call for increased curatorial control, of

the kind that characterized In a Different

Light as well as Hoffmann’s own exhibi-

tions. The notion that curators impose

order and exert control is not troublingin itself, but we need to be alert to spe-

cic instances where curatorial control

overly violates artistic integrity.

Am I worrying needlessly? Is the

application of auteur theory just a

clever way of describing what we cura-

tors have been doing all along? Perhaps,

but there is one essay in The Exhibition-

ist, Carol Yinghua Lu’s “The Curator

as Artist” (which appeared in the third



86

The Exhibitionist

issue), that does give me pause. After

describing curator Massimiliano Gio-

ni’s unauthorized re-creation of Mike

Kelley’s 1993 exhibition The Uncanny in

the 8th Gwangju Biennale, she writes:

Gioni’s curatorial style can seem impos-

ing, almost dictatorial. Its emergence

and visibility in the art world echoes a

certain wider political temperament aris-

ing following the world’s disillusion with

neo-liberalism in the wake of the current

economic crisis. People have realized that

absolute economic and political freedom

is perhaps not the ultimate answer to the

world’s problems, and that elements of in-

tervention, control, and mediation admin-

istered from a higher level are necessaryto maintain order and prosperity on this

planet. These ideas can be applied to the

arts and to reality at large, and Gioni acts

on just such a principle.

I nd the language and implica-

tions of Lu’s analysis to be quite chill-

ing. I didn’t see Gioni’s exhibition and

have no opinion about the success or

ethical appropriateness of his curatorial

decisions. However, Lu’s rationalizationthat increased curatorial control is part

and parcel of a global imperative (and

desire!) for more limited political free-

dom is painfully out of alignment with

the spirit of our times.

PROLONGED

EXPOSURE

Tina Kukielski

I have never curated a retrospective ex-

hibition. And I probably won’t have the

chance for some time.1 In the capacity

of curatorial assistant at the Whitney

Museum of American Art in New York

from 2003 through 2010, however, I

shared in the organization and concep-

tion of a few: Tim Hawkinson in 2004,

Gordon Matta-Clark in 2007, William

Eggleston in 2008, and recently Paul

Thek in 2010. The retrospective offers

a rich platform for curating, as focused

exposure to a single artist affords an in-

depth, sometimes never-before-realized,interpretation of their work. Yet I also

observed that the retrospective could

induce a problematic relationship, es-

pecially in projects with living artists

who might be described as less estab-

lished and lacking the mature distance

required to aid in the presentation of

a selection of their work. Rather than

argue this as a black-and-white issue—

as in, young versus old—I offer instead

that we consider the retrospective as a

goal, a dream, something to be realizedby the artist before death. The pros-

pect of it on the horizon weighs on the

minds of artists, regardless of their age.

The most consistent dilemma I

recognized, as a collaborator but not

a co-curator, was always the question

of what gets in and what gets edited

out of a retrospective. I was especially

attuned to this while working in the

Gordon Matta-Clark archive, which is

split between the Canadian Centre forArchitecture in Montreal and the home

of the artist’s widow in Connecticut.

In her essay for The Exhibitionist no. 3,

Elisabeth Sussman discusses the experi-

ence of “prolonged exposure” to artists’

bodies of work.2 In the stacks of vintage

photographic prints, the binders full of

now-discolored Kodachrome slides, the

shelves of half-used sketchbooks bear-

ing Matta-Clark’s characteristic hand-

writing, the artist persists despite the

fact of his absence.An unanticipated body of work

emerged from this research: what his

widow has loosely named the impossible

projects. They are like thought bubbles,

barely present as scribbles of handwrit-

ten text on a notecard, or a few sketches

buried in a random notebook.3 Some

examples: shopping cart housing, the

air behind you as you move, the kind

of living you can carry along with you.

I clung to each “project” like a dream

that should not be abandoned. In some

cases, the inclusion of an impossible

project in the retrospective exhibition

would have necessitated exhaustive

accompanying text. The ideas thatrecurred most frequently eventually

found their place in the artist’s chronol-

ogy that I was authoring at the time.

Over the course of that research, I

found myself wanting to know exactly

the things that had escaped me in the

archive: What books did Matta-Clark

read? What were his favorite movies?

At about the same time, I was begin-

ning to work with artists on commis-

sioned projects for the Whitney’s lobby

gallery. I organized ve of these showswithin a few years. The artists I worked

with were all mostly my age, in their

30s, about the same age as Matta-Clark

when he died. They all revealed to me

what books they read, the movies and

music that had made a difference. I re-

alize now that what I was looking for

were more, perhaps better, criteria to

judge Matta-Clark’s work by, hopeful

that I could make the case for why or

how to recuperate the impossible andmake it possible again.

In another article in The Exhibition-

ist no. 3, Jessica Morgan concludes that

there is less of a difference between

curating dead and living artists than

there is between their individual ap-

proaches and work. I never did nd

out what movies Matta-Clark loved;

no one could remember. He had died

young, and it had been 30 years since

then. After prolonged exposure to his

work, I had an ever-present feeling ofits profound incompleteness. The idea

of death weighed heavily on Matta-

Clark in the last years of his life, as his

twin brother died just two years before

he did. The artist had acquired a collec-

tion of small, useless micro-parcels of

land in Queens and Staten Island with

the idea of turning them into a project

related to the idea of unexpected sites

for daily intervention, but he never



87

La Critique

got the chance to develop the work as

fully as others that he executed during

his lifetime. He ultimately defaulted on

the taxes, and the properties reverted to

the city upon his death. The associated

photographs, maps, and papers, as wellas a video by his friend, the artist Jaime

Davidovich, remained. They were as-

sembled posthumously around 1992 by

his widow as the Reality Properties: Fake

Estates project—and even reenvisioned

in 2005 as a video project, an exhibi-

tion, and a book by Cabinet magazine4 —

but the unrealized potential of the Fake

Estates remains part of its story, inextri-

cably linked to its signicance and in-

terpretation today.

In the hyper speed at which we to-day demand that artists produce crisp,

nished works worthy of the retrospec-

tive, incompleteness seems less and less

of a possibility. Yet it is to the impos-

sible, the incomplete, that curators

should look in the hopes of unearthing

some small but meaningful shard, a new

perspective from which to look back.

Notes

1. I will be co-curating the next Carnegie

International, scheduled to take place in 2013.I share this responsibility with Daniel Baumann

and Dan Byers.

2. Disclaimer: From 2005 through 2010, I worked

for Elisabeth Sussman, the curator or co-curator

of the three earlier-mentioned exhibitions.

3. Furthermore, these works bridged into col-

laborative projects coming out of Anarchitecture,

a loose network of artists and thinkers who

gathered intermittently and eventually installed

a show together at 112 Greene Street in New

York in 1974.

4. This was in collaboration with the Queens

Museum of Art and White Columns, New York.

CURATOR WITH

A CAPITAL C OR

DILETTANTE

WITH A SMALL D

Mia Jankowicz

A convenient generation divide in cu-

rating is easily observed, or at least fre-

quently invoked, between those who

began curating before the emergence

of curatorial programs and those who

did so after. Curators advanced in their

careers are often heard pronouncing in

panel discussions that they never under-took a curatorial program, with the im-

plication that they are proof positive of

the superuity of curatorial education.

What is rarely asked in these situations

is, had curatorial programs been avail-

able at the sprouting of these careers,

whether at least some of them might

have given it a go?

Maria Lind’s text in The Exhibitionist

no. 3, aside from giving me the novel

experience of thinking of myself as a

tomato, recalls various hallmarks of myexperience in the de Appel Curatorial

Programme in Amsterdam. The urge

to be a Curator with a capital “C,” the

feeling that one must perform curato-

rial “pirouettes,” and the force of po-

litical correctness (which often plumps

for what Lind calls “overcollaboration”)

were all somehow present. The hot-

house metaphor is especially important

to consider, as one of the most resound-

ing elements of curatorial education isintensive access to high-placed contacts,

research material, and, through a form

of institutional endorsement, artistic

trust. This privilege is an essential ca-

reer ingredient, but it does not entirely

make for a high-toned defense of cura-

torial education.

What does this hothouse constitute?

At least with de Appel, it involves inten-

sive periods of travel; personal space

replaced by the constant presence of

ve ambitious strangers; a blisteringwho’s-who schedule of meetings and

tutorials; and a body of resources and

obligations (contacts, local ofcials, as-

signments, base budget) from which to

develop a project. The project is to be

collectively curated, responsive to an

alien geographical context, and done in

a very short time. While any of these

conditions can individually crop up in a

curatorial career, to have them all hap-

pen at once is a perfect storm of curato-

rial articiality.

The hothouse, then, is not entirely

a shelter, but also a place of unnatural

exposure. This crucially leads to a point

that Lind omits: that the kind of curator you are during your curatorial program

(quite possibly a “narcissistic apparat-

chik”) is, thank God, most certainly not

the kind you are in more sensible con-

texts. This means that many of the con-

ditions she describes—and particularly

the dreaded nal project itself—are not

necessarily indicative of the value of

curatorial education.

The question, then, is what is? The

same question is frequently aimed at art

education, where it is also particularlydifcult to answer. As one potential re-

sponse, I want to offer a tentative de-

fense of a description often leveled at

(implicitly, graduate) curators: in Lind’s

words, that they have “intellectual and

artistic varnish rather than profound

capabilities.” To recast this description,

perhaps the curatorial program in its

stone-skimming approach doesn’t pro-

duce well-rounded intellectuals or artis-

tic experts, but is at least a multiplier ofthe best aspects of the dilettante. That

is, someone whose unusual, enthusiasm-

driven capacities in artistic and intellec-

tual elds has a role besides virtuosity;

in the case of the curator often the pri-

ority is in working out diverse aesthetic

and conceptual connections between

leading practices, before attempting to

lead those practices themselves.

Ironically, the dilettante is closely al-

lied with the position of the amateur, so

it is paradoxical to defend a professionaleducation program on this principle.

However, an accepted, almost deni-

tive aspect of the curator is the ability

to mine and reference the theorists of

certain elds, typically in but not always

limited to the social sciences. Curators

are (rightly) not expected to be experts

in these elds, which correspondingly

relieves them of the territorial cer-

tainty of the proper boundaries and



88

The Exhibitionist

languages of a eld of study. Rather,

and quite crucially, it enables them to

develop witty, mercurial, occasionally

fascinating projects with artists and oth-

ers. While this can be enormously prob-

lematic, it strikes me as far more essen-tially proper to the gure of the curator

than the themed exhibition curated by

the academic expert, which often is so

watertight that one imagines the distin-

guished curator defending her thesis all

over again through artworks. Exhibit A.

The spectacularly earnest, intel-

lectually poseur-ish, messy propositions

of end-of-curator-school projects are

the product of a set of experiences that

probably leave you far less expert than

you thought you were before, but pos-sibly more open. As for more profound

experience—given the immense oddity

of the role itself, we can only hope that

our glittering post-curatorial-education

careers will offer us that.

BESTIAL ACTS

Jarrett Gregory

Bertolt Brecht’s theories on the space

of the theater are wholly relevant to the

practice of exhibition making, which

is overdue for an infusion of Brechtian

consciousness. Specically, I mean a

more calculated consideration of pro-

duction and aesthetics, and a revived

valuing of showmanship. Brecht’s ideal

was to create the draw and immediacy

of the sports stadium within the the-

ater—to turn the audience into experts,as sports fans feel they are.1

The 11th International Istanbul Bi-

ennial, titled What Keeps Mankind Alive?

from the lyrics of a song in Brecht’s

The Threepenny Opera, seemed prepared

to engage with Brecht’s questions and

answers. Jill Winder, writing about the

biennial for the rst issue of The Exhi-

bitionist, explored the Brechtian prin-

ciples that inuenced the curators, the

collective What, How, and for Whom

(WHW). Winder cites Brecht’s notion

of transparency, a method he devel-

oped to prevent the audience from sus-

pending disbelief. Transparency is what

kept Brecht’s productions political.His carefully orchestrated moments of

alienation—leading to astonishment—

facilitated a distance that allowed his

audience to see their own conditions

with greater clarity.

Winder relates this transparency to

WHW’s revealing of all of the exhibition

costs in the biennial catalogue. WHW’s

budget was more engaging as an idea

than in practice, however. A more nu-

anced Brechtian gesture, I think, was

the crumpled red paper strewn through-out all the oors of the exhibition. The

project was by the Croatian artist Sanja

Ivekovic,́ who compiled and printed on

the red paper reports on the status of

women by Turkish NGOs. The paper

was an eyesore and a pervasive remind-

er of the artist’s feminist program. In its

crudeness, it resonated with Brecht’s es-

teem of “third-rate provincial theater.”2

Brecht wrote in great depth on the

space of the theater, on opera for a newtime—“Opera—with Innovations!”—

and on epic theater.3 At the Istanbul

Biennial, where was the grand scale, the

prostitutes, criminals, and lowlifes? The

excitement and tragedy, operatic highs

and lows? “Theater remains theater,

even when it is didactic; and if it is good

theater it will entertain.”4

Although the biennial was more

moralizing than entertaining, there

were some works that got to the grimy

heart of Brecht’s subject matter: thegratuitous violence in Igor Grubic’s East

Side Story (2006–8), or the sexual manip-

ulation and uneasy exploitation in Ruti

Sela and Maayan Amir’s video trilogy

Beyond Guilt (2003–5).

Winder acknowledges the crisis sur-

rounding the end of Communism, and

WHW’s hope to revive Brechtian meth-

ods of engagement. But she gets to the

heart of the biennial when she points

out that the exhibition was an argument

for Communism. I would add that the

incantation of Brechtian aesthetics

was just an inroad to a different end.

What Keeps Mankind Alive? had a politi-

cal agenda that outweighed its artisticprogram; it was propagandistic.

Much like a curator, Brecht strad-

dled the roles of producer and author.

In Walter Benjamin’s journal entry

from July 6, 1934, he recounts second-

hand how Brecht frequently imagined

being interrogated by a tribunal: “‘Now

tell us, Mr. Brecht, are you really in ear-

nest?’ ‘I would have to admit that no,

I’m not completely in earnest. I think

too much about artistic problems, you

know, about what is good for the the-ater, to be completely in earnest.’”5

WHW was too earnest about their po-

litical program to do justice to the artis-

tic problems at hand. And though they

used his question to spur a saga of hu-

man discontent, WHW might have hit

the Brechtian sweet spot—that delicate

balance between political agenda and

entertainment—had they heeded what

Brecht wrote in the last line of the song:

“Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.”

Notes

1. Walter Benjamin quoting Brecht, “What Is Epic

Theater—1st Version” in Understanding Brecht,

trans. Anna Bostock (London: NLB, 1973): 4.

2. Walter Benjamin, “Conversations with Brecht”

in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock

(London: NLB, 1973): 115.

3. Bertolt Brecht, “The Modern Theater Is the

Epic Theater” reprinted in Brecht on Theater,

trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang,

1992): 33.

4. Bertolt Brecht, “Theater for Learning,” reprint-

ed in Brecht Sourcebook, trans. Edith Anderson

(New York: Routledge, 2000): 27.

5. Benjamin, “Conversations with Brecht,” 106–7.

YELLOW YEARS

Rodrigo Moura

The Exhibitionist has appeared in the

editorial landscape with a proposal as

new as it is unequivocal: to be a pub-



89

La Critique

lication by experts speaking to experts,

commenting on exhibitions for those

who make exhibitions. According to the

opening note of its editor, it responds

to a growing debate around the role of

the curator. It is thus the rst journaldevoted exclusively not only to the cu-

ratorial trade, which also encompasses

the formation of collections of art and

the everyday functions of art institu-

tions, but also and more importantly to

one of the trade’s most visible aspects:

exhibition making.

The journal strives above all to

claim auteur status for the curator in

the same manner that the Young Turks

of Cahiers du cinéma did for lmmakers,

particularly during the so-called “yel-low years” from 1951 to 1959. But what

seems to be more productive and chal-

lenging in this analogy is the discovery

of the not-always-clear limits within

which curators can claim the authorial

role. If Cahiers attributed to lms the sta-

tus of artworks, this magazine is mak -

ing the rst steps toward attempting to

give the same status to exhibitions. The

frequently tense relationship between

artists and curators is one of the aspectscovered in the self-critique of the editor

in the magazine’s second issue, making

clear just how sensitive this relationship

is and how it has transformed in recent

years.

It is true: One cannot think any

more of exhibition making as a neu-

tral activity. At the root of this practice,

there are choices with aesthetic and po-

litical values and implications. An exhi-

bition is not just an inventory of things,

but rather a gesture that combines con-text, things, and ideas. Whether artists

like it or not, the role of the curator has

transcended that of the mere interme-

diate gure or the academic expert. It

would be interesting to add more and

more to this framework, for example

exploring in greater depth how artists

themselves have experimented with ex-

hibition making. Their crossing of this

boundary is happening with increasing

frequency, and is less reproached than

when the reverse happens. This is a re-

ection to be elaborated upon.

Another context that is typical of

our times is the decay of critical activ-

ity. If criticism was once a school forcurators, as it was for the critics of Ca-

hiers, many of whom went on to become

lmmakers, today most curators are

trained in academic programs. And it

remains to be seen whether the gradu-

ates of these programs are trained to

be curator-authors. The programs are

well known for offering a uniform set of

skills, and most of all they provide a fast

track into the scene, socially and institu-

tionally.

Although it is difcult to argue thatthe decline of criticism is a result of the

rise of the curator’s role (and its aca-

demic professionalization), we cannot

help wondering whether there is some

causal relationship between the two

phenomena. Unlike curatorial activity,

critical activity is lonely and does not

necessarily involve other actors in the

industry. It also does not move capital,

as making exhibitions and building col-

lections do. It is very hard to make a liv-ing from just writing. The pay is terrible

if you take into account the time and

effort required to produce a critical text

of quality. Boris Groys compares criti-

cal work with industrial manual labor in

the 19th-century sense, and the system

of contemporary art with the entrepre-

neurial model.1

Historically, the role of the critic

was to educate the viewer, illuminat-

ing the thoughts and processes behind

a work’s production and the larger sys-tem of which it is a part. The position

of the critic was once invested with a

certain power, but it now pales in com-

parison to the status of the professional

curator, reaching the paroxysm with the

phenomenon of the celebrity curator.

Although to compare these two activi-

ties—the critical and the curatorial—is

not entirely fair, since they frequently

overlap and sometimes conict grandly.

Jacques Rivette once said: “The only

true criticism of a lm is another lm.”

A task of this journal should be a frank

discussion of all this.

It is too early to predict the fu-

ture of The Exhibitionist, but it shouldkeep one goal always on its horizon. If

Cahiers was rst and foremost a stage for

debate (sometimes a battleeld) marked

by cinephilia, this magazine should be

the same in the eld of exhibitions. Did

someone say “expophilia”? Or is it just

exhibitionism?

Notes:

1. “Who Do You Think You’re Talking To?”

Boris Groys in conversation with Brian Dillon,

Frieze no. 121 (March 2009): http://www.frieze.

com/issue/article/who_do_you_think_youre_talking_to/.



90

The Exhibitionist

CONTRIBUTORS

Johanna Burton

Director of the Graduate Program, Center for Curatorial Studies,

Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Kate Fowle Director, Independent Curators International, New York

Massimiliano Gioni

Artistic Director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation, Milan,

and Associate Director, New Museum, New York

Teresa Gleadowe

Curator and editor, London

Jarrett Gregory

Assistant Curator, New Museum, New York

Jens Hoffmann

Director, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco

Mia Jankowicz

Artistic Director, Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo

Tina Kukielski

Associate Curator, 2013 Carnegie International, Pittsburgh

Miguel A. López

Writer and independent curator, Lima

Tara McDowell

Independent curator and doctoral candidate in the History of Art,

University of California, Berkeley

Rodrigo Moura

Curator, Instituto Inhotim, Minas Gerais, Brazil


Director, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf

Julian Myers

Assistant Professor, Visual Studies and Curatorial Practice, California

College of the Arts, San Francisco

Lívia Páldi

Independent curator, Budapest

Emily Pethick

Director, The Showroom, London


Associate Curator, Department of Drawings, Museum of Modern Art,

New York

Andrew Renton Director of Curating, Goldsmiths College, University of London

Lawrence Rinder

Director, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacic Film Archive

Dieter Roelstraete

Curator, Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art


Art historian and curator, Berlin



91

The Exhibitionist



THE EXHIBITIONIST

Editor:

Jens Hoffmann

Senior Editor: Tara McDowell

Editorial Board:

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Okwui Enwezor, Kate Fowle,

Mary Jane Jacob, Constance Lewallen, Maria Lind, Chus Martínez,

Jessica Morgan, Julian Myers, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Paul O’Neill,

Adriano Pedrosa, Dieter Roelstraete, Dorothea von Hantelmann

Copy Editor:

Lindsey Westbrook

Editorial Assistant:Alexandra Morales

Editorial Interns:

Catherine Moreau, Jim Serre, Jules Werner

Design:

Jon Sueda and Jennifer Hennesy/ Stripe, San Francisco

Founding Editors:

Jens Hoffmann and Chiara Figone

Publisher:

Archive Books, Berlin/Turin

Circulation:

Ellie de Verdier

Printer:

Me.Ca., Genoa

ISSN: 2038-0984 / ISBN: 978-88-95702-09-5

info@the-exhibitionist-journal.comwww.the-exhibitionist-journal.com

ARCHIVE BOOKS

Dieffenbachstraße 31, 10967 Berlin

www.archivebooks.org

[email protected]

The Exhibitionist no. 4, June 2011. © 2011

The Exhibitionist and Archive Books, Berlin/Turin



THE EXHIBITIONIST

NO. 4 / JOURNAL ON EXHIBITION MAKING / JUNE 2011

REFLECTION

RESPONSE

CRITIQUE

The Exhibitionist Issue 4

Documents

Transcript of The Exhibitionist Issue 4